ISO 20022

Challenges and Opportunities for Banks and Corporates

The new financial messaging standard is potentially revolutionary for the global payments industry, with far-reaching implications for FIs and corporates. Here, two experts discuss ISO 20022 and highlight the many benefits it could deliver, not least unprecedented cash visibility and control for treasurers.

The global payments industry has undergone a sea change in recent decades – it seems hard to believe that as recently as 2010 the quickest way to get money from London to New York was to actually fly it out there. Payments processing is now on the cusp of another major transformation as FIs and corporates eye the switchover to ISO 20022, the new financial messaging standard.

The new standard, whose history of development goes back to 2004, is arguably the most important transformation in payments messaging since the introduction of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) in 2008.

It aims to create a single common language for payments globally to support every kind of financial transaction. This is being made possible, says Jeremy McDougall, Director, UK Payments Consulting, EY, by the consistent structuring of data within ISO 20022 payments messages.

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