ISO20022 CBPR+ Migration Preparation Ramping Up
(7 March 2022 – Europe) With the wide scale migration to the ISO 20022 payment standard in November 2022 for cross-border payments and reporting (CBPR+), financial institutions must fully prepare to maximise their advantage of the opportunities the transition offers.
The underlying data supporting domestic and cross border payments is undergoing a comprehensive upgrade. Market infrastructures including SWIFT, the global payments infrastructure in the spotlight as part of Russian sanctions, are transitioning from proprietary message formats to the data-rich and highly structured ISO 20022 standard. The global adoption of ISO 20022 is already well advanced with SWIFT participants set to commence their transition over a three-year period concluding November 2025.
From a compliance perspective, richer and structured data offers benefits such as reducing the risk that a payment is incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and limiting the number of false positive sanctions hits that require manual intervention to resolve.
"We're already starting to see a shift to ISO 20022 in the industry. As the major high-value payment clearing systems, and SWIFT, begin to migrate to this new standard, the time has come for us as participants in the payments industry, to start to plan and execute on strategies to make this migration a success and extract the true value that ISO 20022 can bring, in terms of transparency, efficiency and also the development of new, value-added propositions for customers” stated SWIFT ISO 20022 Adoption Programme Lead, Nasir Ahmed.
“Moving to ISO 20022 and having access to that rich data represents a big opportunity for banks to develop new customer propositions. The standard means banks can pass numerous benefits on to their customers. ISO 20022 is a real watershed moment for the industry,” said Soo. “For our institutional clients, it really helps us to help them better serve their end customers.” ISO 20022’s improved data structure removes a number of frictions, around the ultimate debtor field and name and address, for example” Ahmed added.
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