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ISO 20022 for Financial Institutions: Focus on payments instructions

ISO 20022 is transforming the payments industry by introducing a common global standard for cross-border transactions. Endorsed by the G20 and CPMI, its adoption is a vital step towards faster, more efficient payments. With the coexistence period ending on 22 November 2025, Swift is committed to supporting the community’s migration to this key milestone. Start preparing for ISO 20022 adoption today to ensure your organisation stays ahead.

ISO 20022 for Financial Institutions: Focus on payments instructions

Benefits

1
Richer, better structured and more granular data
ISO 20022 enables richer, better structured and more granular data end-to-end to be carried in payments messages.
2
Quality data means quality payments
More transparency and more remittance information for your customers which in turn means better customer service. And a better customer experience.
3
Improved analytics, less manual intervention
Further operational benefits include improved analytics, less manual intervention, more accurate compliance processes, higher resilience and improved fraud prevention measures.
4
Supporting end-to-end automation
A single standard that covers all business domains and end-to-end business processes, ISO 20022 facilitates the creation of new services and enhanced straight-through processing.
5
Using modern technology
ISO 20022 uses modern, mainstream XML technology which is well supported and which facilitates efficient integration.
6
Worldwide adoption
Almost 200 market infrastructure driven initiatives are either already implementing ISO 20022 or are considering adopting the standard for payments and securities transformation projects.

Get started with ISO 20022 today

Find comprehensive guides, training materials, and tools to support your ISO 20022 adoption journey.

CBPR+ roadmap

  • CBPR+ go-live in March 2023

    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

  • CBPR+ release of November 2023

    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.

  • CBPR+ release in November 2024

    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.

  • CBPR+ release in November 2025

    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.

  • End of coexistence

    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.

  • CBPR+ release in November 2026

    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.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CBPR+?

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Cross-border payments and reporting plus (CBPR+) is a workgroup of payments experts whose mission is to create global ISO 20022 Market Practice and Implementation Guidelines to ensure a common roll-out and implementation of ISO 20022 by banks.

CBPR+ usage guidelines define how ISO 20022 messages are to be used for cross-border payments and cash reporting on the Swift network and are to be validated.

Usage guidelines and translation rules are available on MyStandards.

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How is CBPR+ linked to the PMPG?

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The CBPR+ group is composed of payments experts from PMPG communities and a handful of non-PMPG banks nominated by Swift.

As members representing their specific community, each is responsible for reporting to that community and ensuring that its needs are represented in all workshops. Swift chairs the CBPR+ meetings and is responsible for the secretariat.

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Why we are migrating to ISO 20022?

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A global and open standard, ISO 20022 creates a common language for payments worldwide. And its higher quality data means better payments for all. ISO 20022 adoption is also the opportunity to improve customers’ experience with richer information to ease invoices reconciliation, reduce manual intervention to correct or investigate payments with structured data or support customers profiling with better data analysis on the nature of payments processing.

Native adoption of ISO 20022 will have vast implications across your payments value chain. If not done yet, it is time to plan your journey.

Industry decision to migrate

In 2018 the Swift community decided to adopt ISO 20022 for cross-border payments and reporting. With the new standard used in over 70 countries, and forecast to be used in 80% of clearing and settlement of high-value payments by 2025, financial institutions gave Swift the mandate to facilitate the move to this new language of payments.

Read more: Swift ISO 20022 Migration Study, Summary of responses

What the community is saying

  • JP Morgan

    Why did you make the leap to ISO 20022?

  • ABN Amro

    Why is adopting ISO 20022 so important for the payments industry?

  • BNY

    What are the main benefits of adopting ISO 20022 for payments?

  • JP Morgan

    What advice would you give to others adopting ISO 20022?

  • Wells Fargo

    How did you approach the ISO 20022 for payments adoption?

  • EMR Consulting

    What are the benefits of the new Hybrid Postal Address?

  • BNY

    How ISO 20022 is helping BNY navigate the future of payments

  • Diamond Trust Bank

    How ISO 20022 is helping Diamond Trust Bank achieve operational excellence

  • Bank of Cyprus

    How a clear strategy helped Bank of Cyprus adopt ISO 20022

Get started with ISO 20022

  • 1. Learn the basics 1. Learn the basics

    To help our community understand what ISO 20022 is all about, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide to the standard, outlining everything you need to know – from the very basics, to why it matters, how it will impact you and the benefits it offers.

    Download the ISO for Dummies

  • 2. Consult the adoption documentation 2. Consult the adoption documentation

    We have a series of documents available on the Knowledge Centre to support your adoption efforts. Make sure to visit and bookmark the support page for an easy overview.

    Go to support page
    Access key supporting documents

  • 3. Build your business case and plan your project 3. Build your business case and plan your project

    The starting point for​ institutions embarking on their migration​ journey. It provides an overview of the key​ steps to design a future-proof architecture​ based on the ISO 20022 data model,​ identify milestones, and secure​ executive sponsorship.
    Download the guide

    Explore the new ISO 20022 adoption journey in Project Navigator for guidance on your interbank payment instruction migration.
    Access Project Navigator

ISO 20022 CBPR+ compliance for partners

Swift is working closely with the partner community to provide access to necessary information, specifications, tools and test services to support the industry in their journey to adopt ISO 20022, on-time and to the right standard.

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