The global financial community has transitioned to universal adoption of ISO 20022 as the standard language for cross-border payments worldwide. The final switch occurred on November 22, marking the end of coexistence with the traditional MT message format. This development is intended to enhance the customer experience within the current fiat currency system and support the G20 goals for international payments, facilitating faster, more efficient, and data-driven transactions.
This achievement follows years of coordinated effort involving financial institutions, payment market infrastructures, and the wider Swift community, initiated in 2018 when the financial community decided to adopt the standard for cross-border payments. Endorsed by the G20 and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), ISO 20022 is recognized as a key enabler for improved cross-border payment experiences. Its flexible and extensible format provides a foundation for digital transformation.
Swift, a global member-owned cooperative and provider of secure financial messaging services, began a coexistence period with the MT format for cross-border payments and reporting (CBPR+) in March 2023 to ensure a smooth transition. Following the conclusion of this period, ISO 20022 is now required for all payment instructions. On November 23, 97% of payment instructions were observed to have been sent using the ISO 20022 format. A conversion service is in place to automatically convert remaining MT instructions to the ISO 20022 format for a transitional period, ensuring the uninterrupted flow of global payments.
Jerome Piens, Chief Operations Officer at Swift, commented on the significance of the transition, stating, “This has been a huge achievement for the global industry, and a collective effort in upgrading the global payments experience. ISO 20022’s rich, structured data is foundational to the future of payments – and a cornerstone of Swift’s strategy to enable an instant, frictionless, interoperable, and inclusive future. This switch will both enhance risk and control capabilities to better support compliance requirements and lay the foundations for the next generation of payments.”
Piens further noted, “The new standard will power our strategic initiative to create a payment scheme to guarantee a consistently fast, predictable and transparent experience for retail customers worldwide, and will also enable the foundations for our blockchain-based shared ledger, to allow the trusted movement of tokenised value, thereby bringing together TradFi and DeFi for a fully interoperable financial ecosystem of the future.”
With the successful transition to ISO 20022, the focus for the community shifts from format readiness to realizing the full value of structured data. Swift continues to collaborate with the financial community to leverage the benefits of the new standard, offering guidance, tools, and analytics to assist institutions in measuring, optimizing, and innovating with ISO 20022 data. Swift connects over 11,500 banking and securities organizations, market infrastructures, and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories.
