The payments industry is in transition, converging from a wide variety of legacy message and data formats to ISO 20022: a common, global, end-to-end standard. Extra CBPR+ messages went live in November 2023, and we closed the year with a daily average exchange of 800K messages.
ISO 20022 adoption is a cornerstone of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) agenda to improve cross-border payments. We’ll continue to build on the great start made in 2023 and support the Swift community in accelerating ISO 20022 implementation to successfully reach the end of the coexistence period in November 2025.
LinkedIn Live, supercharge your payments business with ISO 20022
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Domestic markets
Congratulations to the Bank of Zambia who, on 14 October 2023, migrated their real-time gross settlement system (ZIPSS) to ISO 20022.
They’re also the first central bank to use the Swift ISO Accelerator Pack, which provides a simple and harmonised way for payment market infrastructures to adopt ISO 20022 in their domestic markets.
“The ISO Accelerator Pack and Swift’s expertise helped Zambia achieve an important milestone in our vision to create and maintain a secure, efficient, and reliable national payments system,” said Francis Chipimo (PhD), Deputy Governor - Operations, Bank of Zambia. “It positions our community even better for active participation in regional and global payments initiatives.”
2024 will be a key year as many more domestic markets have announced plans to adopt ISO 20022: US (CHIPS), Southern African Development Community (SADC), Hong Kong (CHATS), Romania (ReGIS), Macau (SPTR) and many more.
To date, we have enabled 12 RTGSs on Swift to go live with ISO 20022 and continue to assist domestic communities with a harmonised approach through our standards tools and the Swift ISO accelerator pack.
Rich and structured data usage
The Payments Market Practice Group (PMPG) has updated their recommendation to encourage the global payments industry to fully leverage the richness of the ISO 20022 format.
To help the community, they have published a series of Market Guidance papers to provide further instructions on the usage of elements, such as ultimate parties, structured remittance information and regulatory reporting, as well as the usage of ISO 20022 message types, such as how to return or reject a payment using a pacs.004 or pacs.002.
Keep up-to-date with the PMPG’s work as they continue to publish more Market Guidance papers by following them on LinkedIn or via the PMPG website.
Latest news from CBPR+
The Standard Release 2024 for CBPR+ will see the charges messages going live: camt.105 for charges notification and camt.106 for charges request. Two Usage Guidelines have been created for each, for single and multiple cases. Related resources have been published on MyStandards – the Usage Guidelines themselves, the CBPR+ User Handbook and the Readiness Portal.
Given the vast amount of elements available in camt.053 messages, the group worked on guidance as to which elements should be used in priority for interbank statements. It is published as a separate collection on MyStandards and will not be deployed on the FINplus service.
Finally, the CBPR+ work group also published updated versions of its Lessons learnt since go-live, Data integrity market practice guidance and Derived data mapping guidance. They can all be found on the CBPR+ group page in MyStandards.
SCORE is evolving: Find out how
In that context, we’re making some changes to our Standardised Corporate Environment (SCORE), which facilitates communication between banks and corporates. On 24 January, we held a new webinar to explain how payment initiation in ISO 20022 and tracking will be piloted on the service. If you missed it, make sure to watch the recording.
Migrate to the RMA portal
Thank you to customers who have already adopted the RMA portal as their RMA management interface. To provide remaining customers with more time to complete their migration, we have extended the deadline by three months: the new and final date is now 30 March 2024.
After that date, customers with local interfaces will not be able to manage RMA authorisations on the network anymore. This means you:
- Cannot exchange RMAs, grant new RMAs or modify existing RMAs.
- Cannot accept or reject new RMAs issued by counterparties.
- Cannot use RMA query and answer to interact with counterparties.
If not the case yet, please ensure all your live BICs are activated in the RMA portal by 30 March 2024. You can find guidance in the RMA Portal Getting Started document, more specifically in the Central RMA Management Activation section. For other references, please consult the RMA Support Page.
New resources for the ISO 20022 Payment Initiation Relay Rulebook
Financial institutions that relay payments on behalf of their customers through MT 101 will need to migrate that traffic to pain.001 interbank relay on FINplus by the end of the coexistence period. We are pleased to announce the availability of resources to support the digital journey to the accession of the Payment Initiation Relay Rulebook.
- The accession, change and termination e-order forms help you manage the accession status of your BICs involved in the payments relay business.
- The online directory on the SwiftRef portal lists the BICs that have access to the rulebook, along with their status. This offers an easy solution to looking up the status of your counterparties.
For more information, please visit Knowledge Base article 5026117 which gathers all key information about the ISO 20022 Payment Initiation Relay Rulebook. We are also planning for new webinars in the first quarter of 2024.
Orchestrated investigations using ISO 20022 messages
The introduction of new ISO 20022 messages for exception management opens an opportunity to achieve complete market alignment. Combined with standardised smart routing and interlinking of exceptions with underlying payments, they will significantly reduce the volume and elapsed time of investigations.
Swift will extend Case Resolution to become a central place to manage investigations for all banks, with a goal of facilitating the adoption of those exchanges through multiple interoperable channels including: messaging, APIs and GUI. The solution will be piloted over 2024 and will be available live, on an opt-in basis, from November 2024.
For more information, please see Knowledge Base article 5026406.
Learning
An important part of your ISO 20022 adoption project is to get familiar with the new format and its vocabulary. There is a wealth of learning resources available to support you.
- We have just added Adoption Briefing #15 to the series, to look at the link between domestic and cross-border adoption of ISO 20022.
- #16 will soon be available to explain the main solutions available to monitor the state of your ISO 20022 migration.
- We regularly expand the collection of e-learning modules to cover new CBPR+ messages. You can find the various learning curricula on Swift Smart.
- Swift Learning Services also offers classroom training sessions that cover CBPR+ and the FINplus messaging service. See the Swift Training Catalogue for more details and information on how to register.
