Banks and payment infrastructures across the Swift network have finished the move to ISO 20022, marking a major upgrade to global payment data.
The transition was completed on 22 November when the coexistence period with the older MT message format ended.
The shift follows several years of coordinated preparation across the global financial community, which agreed in 2018 to adopt ISO 20022 for cross-border payments.
The G20 and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures regard the standard as a core element of efforts to improve the speed and transparency of international payments.
ISO 20022 introduces richer and more structured data that is expected to strengthen operational efficiency, support more accurate compliance checks and deepen customer insights.
The use of structured data is also viewed as a foundation for future digital currency systems and for enhancing the customer experience in today’s fiat currency environment.
Swift began a coexistence phase in March 2023 to help institutions upgrade their systems and reporting processes.
At the time of the cutover, Swift observed that 97 percent of payment instructions were already being sent using ISO 20022.
A temporary conversion service will continue to translate remaining MT messages into the new format to ensure the continued flow of global payments.
With the migration complete, attention is turning to how institutions can make broader use of the structured data now available.
Swift said it will continue supporting the industry with guidance, tools and analytics to help firms measure performance, improve operations and develop new services on top of the standard.
Jerome Piens, Chief Operations Officer at Swift, said,
“The new standard will power our strategic initiative to create a payment scheme to guarantee a consistently fast, predictable and transparent experience for retail customers worldwide, and will also enable the foundations for our blockchain-based shared ledger, to allow the trusted movement of tokenised value, thereby bringing together TradFi and DeFi for a fully interoperable financial ecosystem of the future.”
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by kuruart74 via Freepik
