SWIFT Cross-Border Payments Migration to ISO20022 Benefits

Data and systems become increasingly important as the global economy gets more interconnected. Thus, an interconnected payments industry needs a universal, data-rich language – ISO 20022.

ISO 20022 offers a common payment processing language with robust details that are critical to global interoperability. Therefore, planned migrations both for cross border payments, and individual payment schemes are now in progress.

March 2023 was a significant milestone for the payments industry as multiple market infrastructures went live with ISO 20022 implementation, including SWIFT Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+), Euro T2, Canada Lynx, and Australia HVPS. During the same time frame, Bank of America’s global branch network successfully completed the roll-out to migrate to CBPR+ and all of these high value clearings.

The industry's journey has continued, and the next significant milestone for the ISO 20022 interoperability period is the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) payments and payment-related messages go-live in April 2024. With the continued global migration to ISO 20022, the work to deliver a range of benefits to clients from financial professionals continue. Bank of America worked to ensure a smooth transition and continues to drive operational efficiency and enhanced reconciliation alongside technical experts.

Refresher on ISO 20022

ISO 20022 is a payment messaging standard that is being adopted by almost all major financial market infrastructures around the globe to replace a variety of legacy payment and reporting message formats. Payment market adoption of ISO 20022 is creating a common language for financial institutions and financial market utilities internationally, increasing uniformity and connectivity between disparate market infrastructures. In addition, ISO 20022 supports richer and more granular data in a structured format, which can help streamline payment processing and improve reporting and data analytics for users.

SWIFT cross-border payments migrated to ISO 20022 in March 2023 beginning a three year long co-existence phase
Widely used across the financial industry by banks, corporates and market infrastructures
70+ countries have already adopted ISO 20022
More enriched data can be carried through in the new formats bringing multiple benefits to users.

Uniformity & efficiency

Structured formats with consistent information carried by the same field enables:

Improved data parsing for increased automation and higher straight through processing rate.
More efficiency, through an industry wide message, as opposed to multiple proprietary formats.

Richer, enhanced data quantity and quality

Being able to include more data than in a legacy message format enables:

Improved reconciliation via automation, reducing funds queries and improving working capital.
Additional information, including provision for URLs and emails, to your beneficiaries to reconcile their transactions, reducing delays and follow-up requests.
Enhanced compliance with evolving regulatory requirements.

The Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) also announced that they will adopt the ISO 20022 message format for Fedwire Funds Service in March 2025. As more market infrastructures go live with the ISO 20022 standard, Financial Institution clients will see increased volume of ISO 20022 formatted messages while legacy and new message formats co-exist in the industry.

To learn more on how we can help with your ISO 20022 transition plan, speak with your Bank of America representative.

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