ISO 20022 migration interconnects the global economy
Having structured data and streamlined payment systems has become increasingly important as the global economy gets more interconnected.
ISO 20022 was developed as a payment messaging standard to increase uniformity and connectivity between disparate market infrastructures. It has been widely adopted in 70+ countries so far and by most major financial market infrastructures. In July 2025, Bank of America successfully implemented Fedwire Funds Service ISO 20022 messages. This milestone for the global payments and USD clearing industry enables all USD clearing financial market infrastructures (FMI), Fedwire Funds Services and the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) to communicate in a common language, improving interoperability with the other financial market infrastructures around the globe that adopted the ISO 20022 format, such as Swift and T2 (Euro clearing).
Key benefits for FIs and corporates
Uniformity and 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 industrywide 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.
- Providing additional information, including provisions to URLs and emails, to your beneficiaries to reconcile their transactions, reducing delays and follow-up requests.
The roadmap ahead
Swift announces MT-MX coexistence period for payment instructions ends
- Ends November 22, 2025 for financial institutions directly connected to the Swift FIN network.
- Legacy MT Swift messages will not be allowed in the Swift FIN network after the November 2025 deadline.
Expected increase of ISO 20022 formatted messages
- As more market infrastructures go live with the ISO 20022 standard, financial institution clients will see increased volume, while legacy and new message formats coexist in the industry.
- This applies to payments not only from Bank of America, but also from across the USD high-value payments industry, as both USD clearing systems have gone live with ISO 20022.
Sunsetting of unstructured postal addresses
- Several major market infrastructures are planning to sunset the usage of unstructured postal addresses.
- All corporates and financial institutions must include structured country codes and town names in their payment instructions to meet the new standard by the end of 2026.
- If not already started, this is a good time to start working on updating the postal address fields of your payment messages accordingly before approaching the industry deadline closely.
Bank of America continues to support our clients along the ISO 20022 journey by providing an opportunity to test ISO messages before their deployment on a lower-lane test environment and will support both legacy and ISO 20022 messages as long as the Swift network allows them.
To help manage the ISO 20022 transition with confidence, speak to a BofA representative, or listen to this podcast for expert insights and practical considerations.
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