ISO 20022 migration: what are the challenges for companies?
The migration of banks to the ISO 20022 standard starts on March 20, 2023! This migration represents a major challenge for financial institutions worldwide. Banks have until November 2025 to adopt ISO 20022 for cross-border interbank exchanges (international credit transfers) and for large-value transfers on the SWIFT network.
ISO 20022, a common and global standard
ISO 20022 is an international standard based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) messages. It is used for the exchange of financial data, including payment and direct debit files, between companies and financial institutions.
In Europe, the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is already based on this standard.
ISO 20022 is becoming more widespread to provide a common and global standard for businesses and financial institutions.
What are the impacts of the migration for your company?
Your non-SEPA international payments are not in ISO 20022 XML format?
You are not required to adopt the ISO 20022 standard, the banks will use a converter to transform your SWIFT MT101 payment files into ISO 20022.
It is in your best interest to migrate your payment flows to the ISO 20022 standard to avoid potential data loss during the conversion process and, more importantly, to benefit from the depth of payment information that the ISO 20022 standard offers.
Your non-SEPA international payments already are in ISO 20022 XML format?
If your company has already adopted the ISO 20022 standard, you will have to use a structured postal address for beneficiaries in your payment files as of March 2023.
This means you will need to structure your beneficiaries’ information with fields dedicated to city, postal code and country. This structuring of beneficiary identification data is intended to simplify the control of bank transactions by banks in order to prevent money laundering and terrorism funding.
The Exabanque software is ready for ISO 20022 with structured addresses! You can process all your international payment orders and structure your beneficiary data directly in the application.
What are the benefits of ISO 20022 migration?
The widespread adoption of the ISO 20022 standard by all market players offers many benefits to companies:
- Elimination of file conversion steps by banks in the inter-bank process and therefore potential data loss
- More accurate accounting reconciliation and payment tracking with commercial and customer reference data throughout the payment chain
- Transparency of information on fees or regulatory information
- Faster payment execution and fewer errors thanks to automated payment processing
- Better fraud prevention
