Our ISO 20022 services for cross-border payments are ready for customer testing.
With a year to go until the start of the payments industry’s migration to the rich data ISO 20022 standard, we are pleased to announce the availability of our new In-flow Translation service. We now offer a full ISO 20022 customer testing environment for cross-border payments, to support financial institutions in their adoption of the new standard.
What is In-flow Translation?
In-flow Translation will enable financial institutions to realise the benefits of rich data when they migrate to ISO 20022, even if their counterparts have not yet adopted the standard.
"One of the guiding principles behind our strategy for instant and frictionless payments is to ensure that nobody is left behind and that institutions are able to migrate in a way that suits them and their customers,” says Stephen Lindsay, Business Lead, Swift Platform. “We are delivering on this promise through the launch of In-flow Translation and the completion of the customer testing environment for ISO 20022, ensuring our community has plenty of time to prepare for the new standard.”
The In-flow Translation service translates rich ISO 20022 messages into the existing MT format for banks that are not ready to process ISO 20022 messages immediately – and it ensures both message formats are delivered so customers always have the complete data. This way, all financial institutions on the Swift network can continue to transact as normal during the industry’s migration, which begins in November 2022 and runs to November 2025.
By enabling richer, better-structured data to be carried in payments messages, ISO 20022 will provide for an improved end-user experience and form a key building block on which to build the future of the financial industry.
Supporting the industry’s ISO 20022 adoption
We have made In-flow Translation available for testing early to help banks familiarise themselves with ISO 20022 and gain experience in the new operational environment. Early adopters will be able to start using the service from August 2022, on an opt-in only basis.
All banks will be automatically enrolled in the service in November 2022, to coincide with the mandatory start of cross-border migration and the go-live of ISO 20022 for high-value payments in the Eurozone.
“The move to ISO 20022 is a key component of our strategy that will unlock significant business benefits for banks,” says Lindsay. “In-flow Translation will be vital to making the transition as smooth as possible by supporting interoperability between message types.”
Minimising disruption and ensuring readiness
With our global network of more than 11,000 institutions and 4 billion accounts in 200 countries, we are taking action to minimise disruption and ensure that our community is ready for the start of migration, including those banks that will not initially adopt ISO 20022 in the back-office.
The completion of the test environment, including In-Flow Translation, means banks have a full year to familiarise themselves with the mandatory changes that are on the way.
