Enhancing the corporate-to-bank payment experience with ISO 20022 and direct tracking

With the introduction of ISO 20022 for payments, financial institutions have a big opportunity to help their corporate clients meet their cash and treasury management goals by reducing friction and improving reconciliation.

Today, corporate payments are complicated by competing standards and proprietary formats, while multi-banked corporates face a fragmented landscape as they interact with a multitude of banking providers with varying features and services.  

To address this, we’ve worked with 25 leading cash management banks and 20 sector-leading corporates, including Roche and Saudi Aramco.

As a result, Swift will standardise the most complex parts of the payment – the initial and final corporate-to-bank legs – by extending ISO 20022 across the entire payment chain. We’ll also help banks offer their customers ready-made and white-labelled payment tracking services by API or messaging channel, giving complete transparency on a payment’s status as well as confirmation of its receipt, and standardising the tracking experience for multi-banked corporates.

“Adoption of ISO 20022 provides a unique opportunity to improve cross-border payments. Capturing rich data at source will enhance the entire ecosystem, driving us closer to our goals of instant and frictionless transactions. We’re delighted to be making it easy for our community to extend the benefits to their customers while simplifying and standardising access to services, such as tracking, which are so important to efficient corporate treasury,” said Thierry Chilosi, Chief Strategy Officer at Swift.

By doing this, the goal is for the standard to replace custom and proprietary corporate-to-bank formats, facilitating automation and reconciliation, and reducing integration costs.

Standardisation of payment tracking data will lead to better customer experience

Multi-banked corporates currently face a fragmented landscape and a piecemeal experience of services and features due to the local investment required by their banking partners.

Our new Swift API and messaging channel will enable financial institutions to offer the same experience to all of their corporate customers. This will give corporates a complete overview of their cross-border payments and managed access to ready-made Swift services – such as payment tracking and payment initiation – with minimal integration effort needed.

Roche, the global pharmaceutical company, has successfully implemented Swift’s new corporate API and messaging channel. This has given them direct access to tracking information for payments they send and receive with one of their key banking partners.

“Swift’s new approach undoubtedly offers significant benefits from a corporate client perspective,” said Stefan Windisch, Global Head, InHouse Bank at Roche. “It enables us to enhance and accelerate our payments analysis, giving us a comprehensive overview at pace.”

“Having direct API access to Swift's payment tracking system will provide us with more transparency and strengthen our ability to analyse overall payment performance. It will allow us to refine our instructions, better identify inefficiencies, and minimise erosion of value in cross-border payments,” Windisch added.

Enabling financial institutions to offer the best possible service to corporate clients

This approach for financial institutions forms part of our broader strategy to enable instant and frictionless transactions around the world.

We have been driving the industry towards meeting the G20’s goals for cross-border payments, and 89% of payments on our network now reach the beneficiary bank within an hour.

Financial institutions have until November 2025 to migrate to ISO 20022 for cross-border payments. Corporates are not mandated to make the change, however adoption provides a unique opportunity to simplify and improve the end-to-end process.

ISO 20022 offers multiple benefits for cross-border payments, with richer, more structured data increasing straight-through processing and reducing friction in international payments.

We are focused on ensuring global access to fast, secure cross-border payments in line with the G20’s roadmap by making it easy for financial institutions to offer access to Swift solutions for their corporate clients, thereby enhancing the overall ecosystem.

Our strategic roadmap includes an initial focus on payment initiation and payment tracking. Many members of the working group are implementing and piloting the new capabilities this year, and we intend to extend the capabilities to our wider community later in the year.

What participants are saying

Stefan Windisch, Global Head, InHouse Bank at Roche, said: “Swift’s new approach undoubtedly offers significant benefits from a corporate client perspective. It enables us to enhance and accelerate our payments analysis, giving us a comprehensive overview at pace. Having direct API access to Swift's payment tracking system will provide us with more transparency and strengthen our ability to analyse overall payment performance. It will allow us to refine our instructions, better identify inefficiencies, and minimise erosion of value in cross-border payments.”

Damien Godderis, Head of Payments Industry Engagement, said: “BNP Paribas are delighted to be working with Swift to offer a bank agnostic solution for payment initiation to maximise the benefits of ISO 20022, and to offer self-service payment tracking. We’re excited to start testing along with our corporate clients.”

Boris Lipiainen, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Kyriba, said: "We are pleased to be working alongside Swift and many others for this pilot programme. By utilising a single standard for payment initiation in ISO 20022 and enabling direct corporate access to tracker data, we are able to integrate additional services that improve the payment experience for multibank clients across the payment lifecycle. Together with Swift, we are able to reduce friction, streamline operations, and increase value for our customers."

Noritoshi Murakami, MD, Head of Transaction Banking Division (Products) at MUFG, said: "We are delighted to have been able to collaborate with Swift and our peers from across the industry, as well as a large number of businesses, to enhance the customer experience for our multinational corporate clients. This will help simplify their treasury processes and improve the cross-border payments ecosystem overall."

Members of the Working Group include: