Author: Jacob Rider
ProjectiveGroup see the importance of collaboration between businesses to not only generate new ideas but to solve present challenges in financial institutions. In our first payments roundtable, we hosted several leading organisations who are designing and implementing the ISO 20022 messaging standard to discuss the evolving payments industry and, in particular, how we should address today’s challenges to best prepare our businesses for the future.
As the leading consultancy at the heart of ISO 20022 adoption, we were able to create an environment for companies to discuss their personal challenges and concerns to a senior peer group who are likely experiencing similar issues or creating complementary solutions. This article highlights the key talking points and takeaways from the roundtable.
ISO 20022 on SWIFT: What is the minimum needed by November 2022?
Like many organisations preparing for November this year, the minimum requirement for ISO 20022 wanted to be understood. Large correspondent banks and financial institutions are expected to be ‘ready’ to receive ISO 20022 messages by November. This means Banks and Financial Institutions must upgrade their payments messaging interface to Alliance Access v7.6 and v4.2 for AMH. If your company is using a third-party, it will be important to contact the vendor to ensure the product version supports FINplus and multi-format MX handling.
For the cross-over period between November 2022 and November 2025, SWIFT will be supporting both MT on FIN and ISO20022 CBPR+ on FINplus, but do take note that after November 2025, SWIFT will no longer support MT cat 1, 2 and 9 on FIN.
Concerns were also raised as organisations were worried that their correspondent BIC’s were not going to be ready to receive ISO 20022 messages. The solution to this is that a Bank or Financial Institution will be able to send a list of BIC’s to SWIFT where SWIFT will generate a report on FINplus traffic which will show who is or isn’t compliant.
Cash Management Reporting
When the discussion turned to cash management reporting (CAMT), it was raised that the translated CAMT reporting message can only create a basic MT statement in the multi-format MX and the CAMT reporting message is up to eight times the size of the legacy equivalent MT, which means that a full translation is not always possible.
It was agreed that Banks should continue to support the generation of cash management reporting messages in MT until the end of the coexistence period that ends in November 2025. Secondly, an account manager should only enable RMA for ISO 20022 reporting messages once they can process the native ISO 20022 message.
Testing and other recommendations
Testing is key; Banks and Financial Institutions are encouraged to work with the vendors, and their correspondents, to perform end-to-end testing across their payments architecture to ensure straight-through-processing rates remain high. This can now all be done in the test environment (FINplus pilot future).
It was also established that communication would help with the transition over to ISO 20022. Corporates should contact their banks to understand the format they plan to send them in, and the banks need to contact their key network correspondents and counterparties to exchange likely cutover timings and considerations.
Launching our Payments Programme
The roundtable highlighted the importance of bringing together senior business leaders to discuss evolving business and technology developments, as well as strategic and leadership challenges that are specifically impacting this group. Following on from the success of the event, we are delighted to launch our Payments Programme to facilitate more of these important discussions, with the intent to share and learn from ideas, use cases and industry insight for a tailored community of senior leaders.
If you would like to attend one of our events or keep up to date with the output of future roundtables, please get in touch with our team.