SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) operates a global network used by financial institutions to send and receive data about monetary transactions in a standard message format that banks all over the world have adopted. Swift is key to the infrastructure for international wires. They recently announced that they are developing a task force to collaborate with some influential payments players to adopt the newer ISO 20022 standard. SWIFT has long been a proponent of ISO 20022, so it important that others building payments platforms, i.e., faster payments platforms, are moving in the same direction:
With most domestic payments networks re-engineering their platforms for a new era of real-time payments, the creation of the new taskforce is seen as a key component of Swift’s ISO 20022 harmonization initiative that aims to address the industry concern around fragmentation and the risk of multiple versions and flavors being adopted across various markets.
The new group, which goes beyond current market practice, will deliver an additional set of ISO 20022 guidelines for high value payments systems to include more structured, accurate and richer end-to-end data.
‘From an industry perspective, this is a meaningful collaborative initiative that can benefit all market infrastructures and their members,” says Gina Russo, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “By encouraging a standardized global approach to ISO 20022 implementation for high value payments systems, the industry as a whole can be in a position to reduce costs, ensure efficient implementation, and realize the true benefits of using a common global standard”.
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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