One of my friends’ duties include setting up electronic billing for her employer. She recently told me
I am creating a new payment file (as European standards are changing) for the equivalent of BACS, and am somewhat upset to discover they won’t accept supplier names with accents in – which for a European bank, strikes me as remarkably inconsiderate.
I enquired further and she replied
The reply I got back from the bank included the line ‘In characterset UTF-8 special characters like Ö, & , é… are not declared.‘ See page 7 of http://www.febelfin.be/sites/default/files/vademecum/Standard-XML-SDD-Initiation-v20b-EN.pdf.
While that page indeed does not have accented characters and Latin-1 is just ASCII (no accents), UTF-8 does include accented characters. It’s a way of representing every character in Unicode!
Bruce's IT-ish world 
UTF-8’s an encoding, so while accented characters can be represented within UTF-8 by a combination of 8-bit characters, they’re not themselves valid characters. Would that maybe explain it? The software should still be able to handle it, mind you – it’s not an excuse.
Hmm? What about the many places (such as http://www.utf8-chartable.de) I’ve seen tables of UTF-8 characters including accented characters? Have I misunderstood encodings?