Swift: 1 Million ISO 20022-Formatted Messages Being Sent Daily

With one year to go before the deadline to move to ISO 20022 for cross-border payments and reporting plus (CBPR+), more than 1 million ISO 20022-formatted messages are already being sent over the Swift network every day.

These messages are being sent to 220 countries and territories around the world, Swift said in a Wednesday (Dec. 4) press release.

Early adopters of ISO 20022 — the new common language for payments worldwide that includes richer and more structured data — are seeing improvements like increased operability across systems and enhanced processing capabilities, according to the release.

“It’s good to see that some institutions are already beginning to realize the value of their investments in this transformation, but we’re excited to see the benefits multiply, and become even clearer, as adoption scales,” Pat Antonacci, chief customer experience officer at Swift, said in the release.

November 2025 is the migration deadline for ISO 20022, according to the release. At that time, the current “period of coexistence” in which Swift converts messages between the MT and ISO 20022 formats will come to an end.

The adoption of ISO 20022 is expected to bring significant improvements in operational efficiencies for both banks and enterprises, Jenny Lee, head of U.S. wire product at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in June.

“Improvement in payment reconciliation can be achieved from being able to maintain and provision end-to-end transaction IDs, counterparty identifiers such as IBAN, and remittance information in distinct fields,” Lee said. This structured data can benefit corporate customer service functions, she said, as well as internal accounts payable and receivable departments.

The Clearing House credited the new ISO 20022 message format as a contributing factor as it settled and cleared a record $2.6 trillion on Black Friday.

The organization’s CHIPS clearing/settlement system adopted the ISO 20022 message format in April, making it the first high-value payment system in the U.S. to do so. The migration means that CHIPS messages now align with message formats used by similar payment systems, enhancing the efficiency and information content of cross-border payments for CHIPS participants and their customers.

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