Welcome to the 10th edition of ISO 20022 in bytes for payments. With less than six months till CBPR+ general go-live, we’re seeing increased readiness activities from the community, with interface upgrades accelerating and increased testing.
Recent engagement with a number of participants indicates that rich data usage will be very low for the first year of coexistence: bank customers aren’t yet ready to contribute to rich data as it requires them to upgrade their applications. General feedback from banks is that they will start their ISO traffic in a ‘like-for-like’ fashion. The use of richer and better structured data will gradually increase over time. We’re currently engaging with an extended set of select customers to better understand their plans for go-live. We’ll share an updated forecast in our next edition.
In the meantime, there’s still much to update you on!
Standards: New Derived Data Mapping Guidance
In April this year, we announced the availability of a new, draft Derived Data Mapping Guidance document. This provides guidance on how to populate information across multiple legs of a transaction. We’re now pleased to confirm the final version is available on the CBPR+ group on MyStandards.
The CBPR+ group are working on Market Practice Guidance for preserving the integrity of payment data in the scenario where an Intermediary Agent is not ready to onward process rich ISO 20022 elements. This guidance defines the roles and responsibilities for reporting such data, which may be omitted from the onward processed payment. These guidelines are currently under final review by the CBPR+ group and their communities. When this is complete, publication is expected at the beginning of July on the CBPR+ group on MyStandards too.
FINplus: Automated subscription to the FINplus pilot current and live services
We have just completed the automated subscription of all eligible institutions to the FINplus pilot current and live services. This doesn’t yet enable the exchange of CBPR+ messages on those two services: CBPR+ messages will be activated in August 2022 on FINplus pilot current, and in November 2022 on FINplus live for all. Early adopters who want to start exchanging CBPR+ messages on FINplus live before November 2022 will have the opportunity to do so from 21 August 2022.
For more details, see the Knowledge Base article 5025106.
We’ll soon be implementing a few extra validation rules on the FINplus service. This will mean the rejection of messages:
- Containing a comment block in the payload (from 23 July for pilot future, and from 6 August for pilot current and live).
- Containing empty tags in the payload (from 6 August for pilot current, pilot future and live).
- Where the payload exceeds 80,000 bytes (from 23 July for pilot future, and 6 August for pilot current and live).
For more details, see the related section of the FINplus Service Description.
The next key milestone will be the FINplus RMA bootstrap, scheduled for 30 July 2022. We highly recommend you connect to the RMA Portal and verify the FIN records that will be used as the basis for this bootstrap exercise. This is to ensure you identify any discrepancies between the central database and your local database and take corrective actions before the bootstrap is conducted.
For more information on the bootstrap exercise and related actions, please see the Relationship Management Portal Getting Started document.
Vendor readiness
To enable participants to benefit from ISO 20022 and adopt the standard in their back-office, we’ve been working with the vendor community of application and connectivity providers:
- If you connect to Swift using a third-party messaging interface, please ensure the product is a Swift Compatible Interface.
- If you connect through a service bureau, please make sure it’s an ISO 20022 compliant service bureau.
- We publish a list of ‘back-office business application’ providers that have self-attested their product as ISO 20022 CBPR+ ready.
Market Infrastructures: The lead up to November 2022
Along with our CBPR+ journey to ISO 20022, by 2025, all reserve currency high-value payments systems (HVPS) will have fully transitioned to the rich ISO 20022, and more than 90% of HVPS value worldwide will move on to ISO 20022 rails.
Many Payment Market Infrastructures (PMIs) using the Swift network, are progressing well with implementing their ISO 20022 services in the lead up to November 2022, with implementation and participant-wide testing underway. Participants should contact their PMI to receive information regarding the availability and publication of Usage Guidelines as well as the latest updates on the timeline of the migration project.
For MIs considering migration to ISO 20022, we've developed an ISO Accelerator Pack for RTGS Communities to provide everything needed for fast, seamless ISO 20022/HVPS+ adoption on SwiftNet InterAct. For more information, please contact your local Swift representative or consult the MI Adoption Guide.
We’re continuing to upgrade our Financial Crime Compliance products, Transaction Screening and Payment Controls (PCS), to support ISO 20022. We’ve just included a number of Market Infrastructure flows, on 13 June 2022, that have been provisioned for Transaction Screening.
For more information on when the various ISO 20022 services will be supported by Payment Controls and Transaction Screening, for T&T and Live, see Knowledge Base article 5025241.
Customer Readiness: Testing the receipt of multi-format messages
All ISO 20022 messaging services are ready and available for customer testing. With the vast majority of customers having already upgraded their interfaces, all should now be testing the receipt of multi-format messages. As we’re now at the mid-point of the year, customers still have five months to complete their required testing activities. To help with this, we’ve been running recurrent webinars providing details on the various testing options and tools available – these are also documented in the Customer Testing Guidelines document. We strongly encourage our community to accelerate their testing activity.
One of these testing options is the Swift Test Sparring Partner (TSP). This can simulate the sending, receiving or relaying of CBPR+ messages. It acts as a virtual counterparty on the FINplus pilot future service, allowing you to test without any other business counterparty involved. Messages in scope of the service are pacs.002, pacs.004, pacs.008, pacs.009, pacs.010, camt.052, camt.053 and camt.054.
The CBPR+ Readiness catalogue is a new offering within the TSP application; this is alongside the existing, broader CBPR+ catalogue. It’s a more restricted set of tests that helps you start testing the receipt of multi-format MX messages and understand the various translation result codes. As a subscriber to FINplus, you have free access to the universal version of the TSP. For more details, see the TSP User Guide.
Finally, to help customers prepare to screen MX messages in Transaction Screening, we’ve run customer training webinars in May 2022. You can access the presentations and recording, through the Transaction Screening Support Page on MySwift.
Resources: What’s new?
- To help you navigate through the suite of available documents, we’ve published a one-page overview document that explains the purpose of each key document and where it fits in your readiness journey.
- Along with the regular update of our existing collateral (Getting Started, Customer Adoption Guide), we’ve published a new CBPR+ Early Adopter Checklist. This new, short reference guide, lists the key activities to undertake and highlights a few points of attention for institutions interested in going live earlier (between August and November 2022).
- We’re continuing to expand our collection of ISO 20022 Adoption Briefings videos on Swift Smart, with the most recent ones covering the RMA and Screening topics.
The ISO 20022 Support page on MySwift has also been refreshed. Please make sure you bookmark it!