ISO 20022 for Financial Institutions: Focus on payments instructions

March 2023 marked a major milestone with the initial CBPR+ release, signalling the start of the migration to ISO 20022 (MX).
This release introduced 15 usage guidelines, covering payment initiation (pain), payment clearing and settlement (pacs), and cash management (camt) messages. These guidelines, available in MyStandards, enable financial institutions to send MX messages regardless of their correspondent’s preferred channel (MT or MX).
Interoperability features like in-flow translation and Transaction Manager ensure seamless exchanges.
CBPR+ messages are exchanged via FINplus, the InterAct store-and-forward messaging service designed for ISO 20022 in a many-to-many setup.

CBPR+ traffic highligs – November 2024

Building on the progress made in March, the November 2023 CBPR+ release expanded ISO 20022 adoption with additional use cases, including cheques, direct debits, cancellations, and margin collections. This update introduced 8 new usage guidelines, available in MyStandards. From this point, implementation follows the regular Standards Release timeline: messages become testable on the network from the end of July and are fully available from November.

Alongside this release, the PMPG encouraged the community to leverage rich data elements in cross-border payments, unlocking the full potential of ISO 20022. Swift supports this guidance with transaction management capabilities introduced in 2023, ensuring full transaction data is maintained centrally. Business validation and data integrity rules safeguard transactions, preventing data loss, corruption, or overwriting throughout the lifecycle. Additionally, the CBPR+ working group’s Market Practice for Data Integrity offers guidance on managing missing or truncated information to maintain seamless transaction processes.

2024 is the year of charges messages. The CBPR+ workgroup developed 4 usage guidelines to cover notification and request use cases. They can be consulted in MyStandards.

The CBPR+ working group is creating new usage guidelines for the camt.025 (“receipt”) and admi.024 (“correspondence”) messages. We expect these guidelines to be available by the end of 2025 and mark another important milestone in the evolution of CBPR+ standards.

Hybrid postal addresses will also be introduced and enabled as part of that release. During a 1-year ‘grace-period’ CBPR+ messages will support a fully structured, hybrid or unstructured postal address for all agents and parties across CBPR+ messages. For more details, please refer to Knowledge Base article 5026188 and our data quality explainer.

At its March 2024 meeting, the Swift Board re-confirmed the community’s commitment to November 2025 as the end of the MT/ISO 20022 cross-border coexistence period, emphasising that priority should be given to payment instruction messages to ensure operational continuity and ongoing interoperability.

This is because the use of ISO 20022 cross-border payment instructions is necessary to enable end-to-end interoperability between financial institutions (FIs) and between FIs and Payments Market Infrastructures (PMIs). For compliance reasons, it is important to ensure that data – particularly related to payment parties – is not lost or truncated along the end-to-end processing chain. This cannot be guaranteed if a transaction that originates in ISO 20022 is converted to the less rich MT standard as part of its cross-border journey.

For more details, please refer to the ISO 20022 FAQs and the Knowledge Base article 6000054.

Unstructured postal addresses will be retired and forbidden across CBPR+ messages. Fully structured or hybrid postal addresses must be used instead for all agents and parties, with a fully structured postal address being the more desirable option where possible.

Usage of an unstructured postal address from this point will result in CBPR+ messages to be rejected. Only the camt.052, camt.053 and camt.054 (statements and notifications) will continue to allow these. The retirement of unstructured postal addresses marks another key milestone as the payment industry mandates use of the structured data options that ISO 20022 offers for postal addresses

For more details, please refer to Knowledge Base article 5026188 and our data quality explainer.