Table of contents
ISO 20022 for Corporates
Why is Swift focusing on corporates adopting ISO 20022?
Swift is building on the global move towards ISO 20022 in the financial industry, which aims to reduce friction in payment processing by carrying richer data across the payment lifecycle. Corporate payments are currently complicated by competing standards and bank proprietary formats – an environment which frustrates efforts to improve the customer experience and data quality and comes with costs and risk for businesses.
Swift will standardise the part of the payment where this complexity prevails – in the initial and final corporate-to-bank legs – by capturing rich ISO 20022 data at the source and extending it across the entire payment journey.
How does ISO 20022 improve treasury processes?
ISO 20022 helps to reduce payment friction, streamline reconciliation by using structured remittance information, increase the accuracy of cash flow forecasting, and improve working capital through richer and structured data that allows forecasting future inbound and outbound payment flows.
Use cases can be found in our ebook "Supercharge your payments business with ISO 20022". The use case "Strengthen corporate treasury activities" goes into corporates specifically.
ISO 20022 messages in SCORE
Can SCORE corporates and banks exchange ISO 20022 messages?
Swift will set the richer ISO 20022 data standard end-to-end, and support with communication channels and complementary services as an evolution of the SCORE offering to capture and deliver high data quality at payment initiation as well as for account reporting. Concretely, this means that in addition to the existing communication channels that are covered by SCORE, such as FIN and FileAct, the SCORE agreement will begin to allow users to exchange ISO 20022 payments over FINplus. Moving FIN flows to FINplus will allow corporates and banks to reap the benefits of network validation and orchestration from the Transaction Manager.
Our ambition is to make this available to the SCORE community by early 2025. The exchange of the ISO 20022 messages between SCORE participants is subject to a specific RMA.
FIN channel beyond November 2025
Can SCORE participants continue to use FIN beyond November 2025, the migration deadline of ISO 20022 for CBPR+?
Financial institutions have until November 2025 to migrate to ISO 20022 for interbank cross-border payments, but corporates are not mandated to make the change. However, Swift encourages corporates to adopt ISO 20022 as soon as possible to benefit from the rich and structured data capabilities enabled by ISO 20022 as it provides a unique opportunity to simplify and improve the end-to-end process.
Categories 1, 2 and 9 of MT messages will be retired for cross-border payments and reporting when exchanged between financial institutions. In other terms:
- Message exchanges in the Swift for Corporates (SCORE) service will continue as they are for the foreseeable future.
- Closed User Groups operated by non-Swift entities (MA-CUG) will continue as they are for the foreseeable future.
Payment initiation flows covered by the ISO 20022 standard
Which payment initiation flows are covered by the ISO 20022 standard for corporate payments?
The usage guidelines support both international and domestic payment instructions that corporates can transmit to their financial institution as pain.001 (and with corresponding pain.002 as Customer Payment Status Report).
The main drivers behind the design of the specifications were to target treasury flows that happen over FIN today, as they are in line with CGI-MP recommendations, while ensuring continuous compatibility with CBPR+ (Cross-border payments and reporting plus), HVPS+ (High-Value Payments plus) and IP+ (Instant Payment plus).
Cash reporting messages
Will cash reporting messages be covered with the ISO 20022 standard for corporate payments?
Swift’s ambition is to enable cash reporting (camt.052/053/054) after a successful pilot of payment initiation over FINplus. The availability of these messages is part of the development of Usage Guidelines for Cash Management & Reporting Messages, in line with feedback from the Corporates Working Group.
How to get ready to exchange ISO 20022 flows on FINplus
How can corporates on SCORE, and their vendors/partners, get ready for exchanging ISO 20022 flows on FINplus?
Swift is testing the service with a pilot group. As the pilot progresses, we will provide all required readiness materials to make it as easy as possible for corporates to support these flows.
Refer to the FINplus Service Description and ISO 20022 for Financial Institutions Customer Adoption Guide for the latest overview of information available on the service readiness.
How can banks on SCORE, and their vendors/partners, get ready for exchanging ISO 20022 flows on FINplus?
Swift is testing the service with a pilot group. As the pilot progresses, we will provide all required readiness materials to make it as easy as possible for corporates to support these flows. Refer to the FINplus Service Description and ISO 20022 for Financial Institutions Customer Adoption Guide for the latest overview of information available on the service readiness.
To facilitate banks to support the processing of ISO 20022 messages with corporates Swift will:
- Re-use FINplus as the communication channel, which is already used today for cross-border interbank flows
- Foresee in-flow translation from pain.001 into legacy MT 101 to support banks that are not fully ready for natively processing incoming ISO 20022 messages and rather continue to process corporate payment initiation requests as an MT 101.
- Enable Transaction Manager for ISO 20022 payment initiation messages on FINplus to help preserve all rich data end-to-end into the interbank flows, even when the interbank payment is sent as legacy MT 103 over FIN.
FINplus compared to FIN
How does FINplus compare to FIN?
FINplus is the Swift core, store-and-forward, message-processing service that supports the secure and reliable exchange of ISO 20022 messages between financial institutions. It enables financial institutions that are currently using the FIN service to exchange financial transactions in MT format, with the necessary environment to exchange the richer ISO 20022 format messages.
FINplus allows for exchanging ISO 20022 messages with Swift network and message validation, a centralised translation service with legacy FIN formats, etc. Additionally, Transaction Manager will be able to capture data from FINplus flows and maintain its integrity throughout the chain.
For more information, read the FINplus Service Description or enroll in the course ISO 20022 for payments with the Moving from FIN to FINplus: Fundamentals.
SCORE participants can continue to use FIN as they do today. However, we will consider this channel more as a legacy channel between corporates and banks.
FINplus compared to FileAct
How does FINplus compare to FileAct?
FileAct serves as a proprietary channel facilitating communication between corporates and their banks. The accuracy, and validity of content in files sent by FileAct depends much on the bilateral agreement and validation of senders and receivers. FINplus allows for exchanging ISO 20022 messages with Swift network and message validation, a centralised translation service with legacy FIN formats, etc. Additionally, Transaction Manager will be able to capture data from FINplus flows and maintain its integrity throughout the chain.
SCORE participants can continue to use FileAct as they do today. However, we will consider this channel more as a propriety host to host channel between corporates and banks.
Payment initiation in Transaction Manager
Will payment initiation become visible in Transaction Manager?
Transaction Manager orchestrates payments on the Swift network by guaranteeing that complete rich data is protected and shared end-to-end based on the community-agreed business validation rules, data integrity rules and visibility rules.
It is directly embedded into our messaging systems meaning that you benefit from it for all your in-scope transactions. You do not need to opt-in to benefit from Transaction Manager. For more information, read the Transaction Manager Business Processing Rules.
Payment initiation over API
Will payment initiation over API be possible?
Swift’s ambition is to enable API connectivity for connected corporate–to-bank payment initiation flows after a successful pilot, based on the same usage guidelines that apply to the ISO 20022 pain.001 messages.
