Despite celebrating its 10th birthday in 2014 – or perhaps because of it – the number of variations of ISO 20022 being deployed is prompting concerns that it is rapidly becoming less useful as a standard. There is increasing recognition that differences in implementation and market practices could lead to a fragmentation of the standard.
It seems not a day goes by without seeing those three little letters and five numbers – ISO 20022 – appearing in headlines or articles. But hang on a minute, what’s all the commotion about? It’s just another message format that I need to make sure my systems can handle, right?
Swift has published a best practice guideline for implementation of ISO 20022 for financial institutions, based on experience gleaned through its involvement in more than 150 consulting projects for more than 70 clients across the globe.
A range of product and service announcements during Sibos show Swift becoming ever more tightly integrated with customer and vendor systems.
The original concept of the ISO 20022 was to create a repository of data used in financial messaging to communicate business information of any type – and to be able to add any types of data that might arise in the future. There has been a lot of focus on the use of the standard in payments and securities messaging roles, this has obscured its current and potential use in other areas.
