One clear takeaway from our conversations is that every bank we spoke to is confident of meeting the November 2025 ISO 20022 migration deadline. But a bigger question still hangs in the air: what does this shift really mean for corporates – and how can the industry drive meaningful adoption to ensure that everyone benefits from the advantages of this common financial language?
Efficiency in treasury operations
The enhanced data richness of ISO 20022 holds significant promise for all stakeholders, supporting improved compliance, automation, reconciliation and greater overall visibility. For corporates, the ability to see more data – particularly around receivables and invoice details – opens the door to faster reconciliation, with the potential to reduce days sales outstanding (DSO), a critical working capital metric for treasury teams.
ISO 20022 provides new means to help tackle financial crime, since structured data allows for clearer information and descriptions in each payment message.
“Another important benefit to corporate treasury is greater straight through processing as the payment message will be structured and standardised, reducing the risk of costly manual repairs,” explains George Abraham, CBPR+ and ISO execution lead, payments at Citi Services.
Standard Chartered is enriching CAMT reporting to use the enhanced ISO 20022 fields. CAMT is the message used for reporting and notification of account transactions and balances, an equivalent of the MT940/950 SWIFT messages for bank account statements.
With the structured fields now available for on-behalf-of information, it can offer such payments to a broader set of clients who can supply this information in a compliant format, making for a much safer and timely processing experience, explains the bank’s global head of cash management, Mahesh Kini.
“Given both sending and receiving institutions need to adopt the standard, the industry is yet to fully leverage the benefits,” he adds. “But different formats across cross-border and domestic payments will increasingly be harmonised to allow for easier switching between schemes. This will drive operational and cost efficiencies for clients as it will reduce efforts required for detailed data mapping, conversion and truncation on a country-by-country basis.”
Applications beyond payments
ISO 20022, through its flexibility to support both XML and JSON tools for storing and transmitting data, is set to enable business to upgrade their business models. The combination of ISO 20022 with APIs and open banking is expected to help corporates exploit digital commerce models more easily.
Payment messages with rich structured remittance information can potentially facilitate paperless processing of trade finance for both open account and document-based financing.
Standard’s Kini is of the opinion that ISO 20022 sees applications in trade finance as well. “Payment messages with rich structured remittance information can potentially facilitate paperless processing of trade finance for both open account and document-based financing,” he says. “Structured rich data in payment messages can be a key enabler to truly digital supply chain financing. Structured fields for on-behalf-of information will also facilitate technical and operational efficiencies for payments-on-behalf-of and receivables-on-behalf-of implementations where regulations permit.”
Internationally trading businesses can add a wealth of additional data to an ISO 20022 payment message. This data could be anything from purchase orders to additional details specific to the underlying transaction, with the aim of facilitating more efficient transactions and improving the client experience.
“Trade and payments are intrinsically linked, which means we can use enriched data in a payment message – for example, an invoice number, purchase order or regulatory information – to streamline open account flow,” explains Rogier van Lammeren, managing director, head of trade & working capital products at Lloyds.
The rich, structured data is expected to significantly improve transaction monitoring. “ISO 20022 provides new means to help tackle financial crime, since structured data allows for clearer information and descriptions in each payment message,” van Lammeren adds.
Sending and receiving banks can share risk scores, accelerate inquiry and investigation resolution times by looking through structured data fields, and improve reconciliation on nostro/vostro accounts using the additional payment data that can be included in account statements.
A standardised, structured and simplified future
The SWIFT migration to ISO 20022 XML is just the latest step in the broader digital transformation of payments and clearly has the potential to deliver material benefits for corporates, according to van Lammeren.
Adoption of ISO 20022... has the potential to converge payment methods to allow for intelligent routing of payments based on structured data elements
“As the ISO 20022 rulebook has been designed by the banking community to specifically enhance operational resilience, processes, data and client propositions, financial institutions are helping future-proof methods of making international payments,” he observes.
“For banks, adoption of ISO 20022 will help in the simplification of technology architectures and has the potential to converge payment methods to allow for intelligent routing of payments based on structured data elements,” Citi Services’ Abraham highlights.
However, he also cautions that there is no one-size-fits-all approach and that corporates need to engage with their banking partners to understand the opportunities and considerations that will need to be factored into any migration plan.
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