(9 April 2019 – Australia) The Reserve Bank of Australia is canvassing bank views on plans to migrate the nation's payments networks to the ISO 200022 messaging standard.
The move comes as financial messaging co-operative Swift – which provides the technology backbone for Australia's faster payments platform – announced plans to cease ongoing support of some MT messages used for cross-border payments after November 2025 and migrate them to the ISO 20022 standard.
The Australian payments system comprises a number of payment services, clearing systems and settlement systems which use the MT standard for messages used in trading, clearing, settlement and payments, including for the Reserve Bank's real-time gross settlement system.
“The Reserve Bank and the Australian Payments Council believe that it is an appropriate time to consider adoption of the ISO 20022 standard and are undertaking this consultation to assist the industry in coming to agreement on key strategic decisions for an ISO 20022 migration project,” states the RBA. “The aim is for this project to be complete by the end of 2024, ahead of the completion of Swift's cross-border payments migration and in line with international migrations.”
The Reserve Bank and APC have invited interested parties to provide their views in writing by 31 May 2019.