What Options Does the Solution Architect Have

The simplistic approach of dropping all special characters (e.g., by treating "Müller" as "Muller") will lead to: (a) passing of a transaction that is meant to be blocked; or (b) blocking of a genuine transaction. In the first case, the company risks non-compliance with regulations relatin to terrorism and money laundering. By introducing a "false positive," the second case leads to the risks of customer dissatisfaction and higher repair costs when the error is realized later and has to be manually fixed. In other words, a solution architect cannot afford to take a simplistic approach.

On the other hand, by incorporating extended character sets into all applications, the solution architect can help the company avoid these risks altogether since there won't be any mismatch between the various applications in the SEPA system landscape in the event that fund transfer instructions contain special characters.

But if this change turns out to be too far-reaching to implement immediately, the solution architect could, in the short term, tweak all applications to use generally-accepted English equivalents for non-English accents. For example, "Mueller" for "Müller" in the above example is derived by substituting the umlaut symbol with an "e" as per standard convention instead of ignoring the umlaut symbol.

In the medium term, the solution architect could evangelize the adoption of latest standards and technology stacks that support extended character sets and concurrent multilingual support.