ISO 20022
ISO 20022 is an international standard for exchanging electronic messages between financial institutions.
The financial world is undergoing a significant transformation towards more efficient, transparent and intelligent payment systems. At Standard Bank, we are committed to keeping your business at the forefront of these changes. A pivotal part of this evolution is the global transition to ISO 20022, a new, universal messaging standard for financial transactions. This standard provides a richer, more structured data format that will enhance efficiency, transparency and interoperability across the financial industry.
For a comprehensive guide, please download our detailed PDF at the bottom of this page.
Benefits of ISO 20022
Enhanced data quality:
Richer, more structured payment information
Improved efficiency:
Faster processing, reduced errors and better reconciliation
Stronger compliance and transparency:
Better reporting, fraud detection and traceability
Future-proof systems:
Aligned with global standards and future innovations
What is ISO 20022?
Think of ISO 20022 as an upgrade to the language banks and financial institutions use to communicate about payments. It's an open, global standard for financial messaging that provides a common platform for developing messages across various financial domains, including payments, securities, trade services and cards. Its key characteristic is its ability to carry significantly more structured data than older, less detailed Message Type (MT) formats.
Why the ISO 20022 transition?
The global financial world is transforming to create a more efficient, transparent and intelligent payment ecosystem. This pivotal shift to ISO 20022, a universal messaging standard, directly addresses the need for improved payment data quality and transparency. It upgrades the language banks use, allowing for richer, more structured information within financial transactions, ensuring clarity from start to finish.
This transition also promises significant operational benefits. By standardising and enriching payment messages, ISO 20022 enables enhanced efficiency in processing and reconciliation, leading to faster, more reliable international payments with fewer errors. Moreover, the increased data granularity provides better compliance and fraud detection capabilities, strengthening regulatory reporting and improving the identification of suspicious activities.
Ultimately, this move is about building future-ready systems aligned with emerging real-time payment innovations. While the initial phase introduced new message types, the current focus is on mandatory compliance, especially for structured addresses and detailed beneficiary information. This ensures our financial infrastructure is robust, scalable and prepared for the next generation of digital finance, securing a more resilient global payment network.
How will ISO 20022 affect you?
As you’re a valued corporate client, this transition will impact how you process and receive international payments. It's crucial to understand these changes to ensure a smooth transition for your operations.
As banks prepare for full migration by November 2025 under CBPR+, all payment instructions between institutions will move to this richer, structured format.
For corporates, this means your role goes beyond initiating payments. You're a vital part of the payment chain that ensures accurate, compliant and complete data flows from source to settlement. Beneficiary details, jurisdictional requirements and structured formats need to be captured upfront because without that, the payment may stall or fail. Regulators in multiple markets are increasing scrutiny of cross-border flows, making transparency more critical than ever.
New ISO 20022 – How is it different
While ISO 20022 has been a topic for some time, the current phase introduces mandatory requirements for cross-border payments. This is not just about new message types but about enforcement and detailed application of existing capabilities.
Key changes you need to be aware of
- Mandatory structured address requirements: This is the most significant immediate update. While ISO 20022 always allowed for structured addresses, their mandatory enforcement is now approaching. This means a fundamental change in how address data must be provided.
- Increased granularity for compliance: ISO 20022 leverages richer data for enhanced regulatory reporting and ultimate party identification (ultimate debtor/creditor).
- Phased enforcement: Specific deadlines (e.g. November 2025 for certain jurisdictions/entities and November 2026 for broader unstructured address deprecation) are now in place.
- Focus on beneficiary data: Strong emphasis on the quality and structure of beneficiary information is intended to improve traceability and compliance screening.
Preparation steps for transition
To ensure a seamless transition and leverage the benefits of ISO 20022, we recommend the following key actions:
- Review and enrich your internal data, especially structured address fields and regulatory information for your suppliers, vendors and beneficiaries. This is paramount for compliance.
- Assess your migration needs: compliance is mandatory for SUPE and NOSU entities by 22 November 2025. Consider your payment volumes, systems and international payment destinations.
- Engage your ERP/TMS providers: confirm their ISO 20022 readiness and assess upgrade pathways. Clients in regulated corridors, for example, UAE, China, India, UK (property) and USA (IRS), are advised to begin enhancement testing by Q3 2025.
- Understand channel-specific impacts.
- ERP-integrated clients: pain.001 v3 may continue if configured for structured addresses, purpose codes, tax IDs and LEI.
- SWIFT ScorePlus clients: pain.001 v9 is available, supporting enhanced traceability from November 2025.
- Host-to-Host / File Upload clients: Our ISO-compliant messaging specification allows pain.001 v3 with enhancements. Adoption of enhancements is strongly encouraged by 22 November 2025 for high-impact jurisdictions (e.g. Bahrain, Canada, China, UAE, India, Japan, USA and UK).
- Online banking will require complete beneficiary details, structured address and purpose of payment for selected markets.
- Test early: schedule testing with your bank or service provider to ensure compatibility and avoid last-minute disruptions.
- Stay informed: keep an eye out for further communications from us.
What makes ISO 20022 different?
ISO 20022 stands out because it is a modern, global, and highly structured messaging standard that addresses the limitations of legacy formats, offering unparalleled benefits to the financial industry:
- Richer and structured data: Unlike older messaging formats that rely on unstructured and size-restricted fields, ISO 20022 provides detailed, structured, and dedicated fields for financial data. This eliminates the need for workarounds, reduces errors, and enhances data quality.
- Global interoperability: ISO 20022 unifies financial messaging standards worldwide, enabling seamless communication between institutions, market infrastructures, and corporates across borders. This fosters a truly interconnected financial ecosystem.
- Improved automation and efficiency: With standardised messaging, banks and institutions can automate processes more effectively, reducing manual interventions and operational costs.
- Flexibility and scalability: ISO 20022 is designed to adapt to evolving payment systems and new use cases, making it future proof for upcoming innovations and changes in the financial landscape.
- Enhanced compliance and transparency: Its structured data fields facilitate better compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g., sanctions screening and anti-money laundering measures), ensuring greater transparency and trust in payment processing.
Overall, ISO 20022 is more than just a standard - it’s a transformative framework that drives efficiency, compliance, and innovation in the financial industry.
How this affects cross-border payments
Financial institutions will follow CBPR+ guidelines, while corporates have more flexibility under SCORE.
Financial institution journey:
Cross-border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) defines a set of specifications for ISO 20022 financial messages exchanged over the Swift network. These new messages, often referred to as 'MX' messages, replace the legacy MT messages with an XML-based format that offers richer, structured data and better alignment with modern financial requirements. CBPR+ focuses on financial institution-to-financial institution (FI-FI) flows and has been officially supported by Swift since March 2023.
Our organisation is fully aligned with the CBPR+ roadmap. We are focusing on the implementation of Customer Credit Transfers (pacs.008), Financial Institution Credit Transfers (pacs.009 core and related COV), Payment Initiation Relay (Interbank pain.001v9), and supporting messages such as Payment Cancellations (camt.056), with a target completion date of 22 November 2025.
Additionally, we are advancing efforts in Cash Reporting and are open to testing related messages such as camt.052 (Account Report), camt.053 (Statement of Account), and camt.054 (Debit/Credit Notifications).
These efforts position us at the forefront of modernising cross-border payment systems, ensuring greater efficiency, transparency, and compliance.
Certain financial institutions, such as supervised financial institutions (SUPE) and non-supervised entities (NOSU), are required to migrate to CBPR+ by 22 November 2025. While MT and MX formats currently coexist, the transition is being carefully managed, with MT messages set to phase out by November 2025.
ISO 20022's adoption resolves the data limitations and inefficiencies of the legacy MT format, enabling structured and standardised data. This improves compliance, automation, and interoperability while enhancing transparency and efficiency in cross-border payments.
Corporate journey:
Corporates under CORP and TRCO categories can continue using MT formats, as there is no end of coexistence currently foreseen for SCORE flows. Corporate-to-bank and bank-to-corporate messaging will continue over FIN and FileAct channels as they do today.
There’s no end date from Swift on supporting FIN MT101 between corporates and their banks over Swift; however, this format is gradually becoming a legacy standard with the introduction of structured data.
We will continue to support the current pain.001V2 and pain.001V3 formats, with only minor technical file adjustments required to meet the necessary standards. In addition, the new Payment Initiation (pain.001 V9) format is now available for early adopters through SCOREplus.
Corporates interested in benefiting from ISO 20022 can adopt the SCOREplus usage guidelines, which offer a single ISO 20022 format for payment initiation via pain.001v9 messages.
Furthermore, the FINplus channel is now fully operational, serving as an ISO 20022-enabled option for payment initiation over Swift. Corporates are encouraged to reach out to their Relationship Manager for more information and guidance.
Transaction Manager Platform ISO 20022
Transaction Manager is a platform developed by Swift to support the ISO 20022 migration and provide enhanced messaging capabilities for the Swift community.
The platform keeps a copy of a transaction’s data which can be updated by parties to the transaction using different protocols and formats. It will support the coexistence of MX and MT messages during Swift’s interoperability period of the ISO 20022 migration by preserving rich ISO 20022 transaction data even when an intermediary in a transaction can only send MT messages.
This will benefit financial institutions by:
- Providing them with ample time to ensure that they are MX ready,
- Lowering the implementation risks compared to a big-bang approach,
- Allowing banks to follow the agile approach and
- Facilitating testing.
-
What is ISO 20022?
-
Why the ISO 20022 transition?
-
How will ISO 20022 affect you?
-
New ISO 20022 – How is it different
-
Preparation steps for transition
-
What makes ISO 20022 different?
-
How this affects cross-border payments
-
Transaction Manager Platform ISO 20022
Think of ISO 20022 as an upgrade to the language banks and financial institutions use to communicate about payments. It's an open, global standard for financial messaging that provides a common platform for developing messages across various financial domains, including payments, securities, trade services and cards. Its key characteristic is its ability to carry significantly more structured data than older, less detailed Message Type (MT) formats.
The global financial world is transforming to create a more efficient, transparent and intelligent payment ecosystem. This pivotal shift to ISO 20022, a universal messaging standard, directly addresses the need for improved payment data quality and transparency. It upgrades the language banks use, allowing for richer, more structured information within financial transactions, ensuring clarity from start to finish.
This transition also promises significant operational benefits. By standardising and enriching payment messages, ISO 20022 enables enhanced efficiency in processing and reconciliation, leading to faster, more reliable international payments with fewer errors. Moreover, the increased data granularity provides better compliance and fraud detection capabilities, strengthening regulatory reporting and improving the identification of suspicious activities.
Ultimately, this move is about building future-ready systems aligned with emerging real-time payment innovations. While the initial phase introduced new message types, the current focus is on mandatory compliance, especially for structured addresses and detailed beneficiary information. This ensures our financial infrastructure is robust, scalable and prepared for the next generation of digital finance, securing a more resilient global payment network.
As you’re a valued corporate client, this transition will impact how you process and receive international payments. It's crucial to understand these changes to ensure a smooth transition for your operations.
As banks prepare for full migration by November 2025 under CBPR+, all payment instructions between institutions will move to this richer, structured format.
For corporates, this means your role goes beyond initiating payments. You're a vital part of the payment chain that ensures accurate, compliant and complete data flows from source to settlement. Beneficiary details, jurisdictional requirements and structured formats need to be captured upfront because without that, the payment may stall or fail. Regulators in multiple markets are increasing scrutiny of cross-border flows, making transparency more critical than ever.
While ISO 20022 has been a topic for some time, the current phase introduces mandatory requirements for cross-border payments. This is not just about new message types but about enforcement and detailed application of existing capabilities.
Key changes you need to be aware of
- Mandatory structured address requirements: This is the most significant immediate update. While ISO 20022 always allowed for structured addresses, their mandatory enforcement is now approaching. This means a fundamental change in how address data must be provided.
- Increased granularity for compliance: ISO 20022 leverages richer data for enhanced regulatory reporting and ultimate party identification (ultimate debtor/creditor).
- Phased enforcement: Specific deadlines (e.g. November 2025 for certain jurisdictions/entities and November 2026 for broader unstructured address deprecation) are now in place.
- Focus on beneficiary data: Strong emphasis on the quality and structure of beneficiary information is intended to improve traceability and compliance screening.
To ensure a seamless transition and leverage the benefits of ISO 20022, we recommend the following key actions:
- Review and enrich your internal data, especially structured address fields and regulatory information for your suppliers, vendors and beneficiaries. This is paramount for compliance.
- Assess your migration needs: compliance is mandatory for SUPE and NOSU entities by 22 November 2025. Consider your payment volumes, systems and international payment destinations.
- Engage your ERP/TMS providers: confirm their ISO 20022 readiness and assess upgrade pathways. Clients in regulated corridors, for example, UAE, China, India, UK (property) and USA (IRS), are advised to begin enhancement testing by Q3 2025.
- Understand channel-specific impacts.
- ERP-integrated clients: pain.001 v3 may continue if configured for structured addresses, purpose codes, tax IDs and LEI.
- SWIFT ScorePlus clients: pain.001 v9 is available, supporting enhanced traceability from November 2025.
- Host-to-Host / File Upload clients: Our ISO-compliant messaging specification allows pain.001 v3 with enhancements. Adoption of enhancements is strongly encouraged by 22 November 2025 for high-impact jurisdictions (e.g. Bahrain, Canada, China, UAE, India, Japan, USA and UK).
- Online banking will require complete beneficiary details, structured address and purpose of payment for selected markets.
- Test early: schedule testing with your bank or service provider to ensure compatibility and avoid last-minute disruptions.
- Stay informed: keep an eye out for further communications from us.
ISO 20022 stands out because it is a modern, global, and highly structured messaging standard that addresses the limitations of legacy formats, offering unparalleled benefits to the financial industry:
- Richer and structured data: Unlike older messaging formats that rely on unstructured and size-restricted fields, ISO 20022 provides detailed, structured, and dedicated fields for financial data. This eliminates the need for workarounds, reduces errors, and enhances data quality.
- Global interoperability: ISO 20022 unifies financial messaging standards worldwide, enabling seamless communication between institutions, market infrastructures, and corporates across borders. This fosters a truly interconnected financial ecosystem.
- Improved automation and efficiency: With standardised messaging, banks and institutions can automate processes more effectively, reducing manual interventions and operational costs.
- Flexibility and scalability: ISO 20022 is designed to adapt to evolving payment systems and new use cases, making it future proof for upcoming innovations and changes in the financial landscape.
- Enhanced compliance and transparency: Its structured data fields facilitate better compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g., sanctions screening and anti-money laundering measures), ensuring greater transparency and trust in payment processing.
Overall, ISO 20022 is more than just a standard - it’s a transformative framework that drives efficiency, compliance, and innovation in the financial industry.
Financial institutions will follow CBPR+ guidelines, while corporates have more flexibility under SCORE.
Financial institution journey:
Cross-border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) defines a set of specifications for ISO 20022 financial messages exchanged over the Swift network. These new messages, often referred to as 'MX' messages, replace the legacy MT messages with an XML-based format that offers richer, structured data and better alignment with modern financial requirements. CBPR+ focuses on financial institution-to-financial institution (FI-FI) flows and has been officially supported by Swift since March 2023.
Our organisation is fully aligned with the CBPR+ roadmap. We are focusing on the implementation of Customer Credit Transfers (pacs.008), Financial Institution Credit Transfers (pacs.009 core and related COV), Payment Initiation Relay (Interbank pain.001v9), and supporting messages such as Payment Cancellations (camt.056), with a target completion date of 22 November 2025.
Additionally, we are advancing efforts in Cash Reporting and are open to testing related messages such as camt.052 (Account Report), camt.053 (Statement of Account), and camt.054 (Debit/Credit Notifications).
These efforts position us at the forefront of modernising cross-border payment systems, ensuring greater efficiency, transparency, and compliance.
Certain financial institutions, such as supervised financial institutions (SUPE) and non-supervised entities (NOSU), are required to migrate to CBPR+ by 22 November 2025. While MT and MX formats currently coexist, the transition is being carefully managed, with MT messages set to phase out by November 2025.
ISO 20022's adoption resolves the data limitations and inefficiencies of the legacy MT format, enabling structured and standardised data. This improves compliance, automation, and interoperability while enhancing transparency and efficiency in cross-border payments.
Corporate journey:
Corporates under CORP and TRCO categories can continue using MT formats, as there is no end of coexistence currently foreseen for SCORE flows. Corporate-to-bank and bank-to-corporate messaging will continue over FIN and FileAct channels as they do today.
There’s no end date from Swift on supporting FIN MT101 between corporates and their banks over Swift; however, this format is gradually becoming a legacy standard with the introduction of structured data.
We will continue to support the current pain.001V2 and pain.001V3 formats, with only minor technical file adjustments required to meet the necessary standards. In addition, the new Payment Initiation (pain.001 V9) format is now available for early adopters through SCOREplus.
Corporates interested in benefiting from ISO 20022 can adopt the SCOREplus usage guidelines, which offer a single ISO 20022 format for payment initiation via pain.001v9 messages.
Furthermore, the FINplus channel is now fully operational, serving as an ISO 20022-enabled option for payment initiation over Swift. Corporates are encouraged to reach out to their Relationship Manager for more information and guidance.
Transaction Manager is a platform developed by Swift to support the ISO 20022 migration and provide enhanced messaging capabilities for the Swift community.
The platform keeps a copy of a transaction’s data which can be updated by parties to the transaction using different protocols and formats. It will support the coexistence of MX and MT messages during Swift’s interoperability period of the ISO 20022 migration by preserving rich ISO 20022 transaction data even when an intermediary in a transaction can only send MT messages.
This will benefit financial institutions by:
- Providing them with ample time to ensure that they are MX ready,
- Lowering the implementation risks compared to a big-bang approach,
- Allowing banks to follow the agile approach and
- Facilitating testing.
The Standard Bank Approach
At Standard Bank, we are committed to ensuring a seamless and supported transition for our clients as the financial world moves to ISO 20022. We have adopted a pragmatic approach that enables continuity for clients using legacy formats while strongly encouraging early adoption of future-ready standards to support long-term scalability and compliance.
We will be ready to receive ISO 20022 payment instructions from 22 November 2025, and we are here to support you throughout the coexistence period. During this time, we will continue to receive, send and process both traditional MT and the new ISO 20022 message types. Our focus is on guiding you through the mandatory requirements, particularly around structured addresses and enhanced beneficiary data, ensuring your payments continue to flow without disruption.
Whether you're testing, onboarding or optimising for compliance, our teams are on hand to guide you at every step. We encourage you to review your current payment processes and engage with your dedicated service consultant to discuss your specific migration path and ensure you meet the upcoming mandatory requirements. Let’s move forward together.
Further resources and support
For a full, in-depth understanding of all requirements, deadlines and technical specifications, please download our detailed PDF guide:
For a full, in-depth understanding of all requirements, deadlines and technical specifications, please download our detailed PDF guide:
Multiformat and ISO Message types
| Type | MT Migration to ISO 20022 CBPR+ MT Message |
MT Migration to ISO 20022 CBPR+ Equivalent CBPR+ ISO 20022 Message |
Standard Bank's Approach |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payment Instructions | MT101 | pain.001 pain.002 in response to pain.001 |
Standard Bank does not send MT101 and will remain receiving the MT101 message post 20 March 2023. The transition to the CBPR+ ISO 20022 format will take place post 20 March 2023 upon conclusion of a bilateral agreement with the sending bank. The receipt of the CBPR+ ISO 20022 message is not enabled on RMA Portal. |
| Payments and Settlements | MT103 MT202 MT202 COV MT210 |
pacs.008 pacs.009 pacs.009 cov pacs.004 pacs.002 (reject only) camt.057 |
Standard Bank will be able to receive both the CBPR+ ISO 20022 messages and the MT messages from 20 March 2023. Standard will continue to send the MT messages from 20 March 2023, and will migrate to sending the CBPR+ ISO 20022 equivalents through a phased migration, post 20 March 2023. |
| Stop and Recall | MT192 MT292 MT196 MT296 |
camt.056 camt.029 (in response to camt.056) |
Standard Bank will be able to receive both the CBPR+ ISO 20022 messages and the MT messages from 20 March 2023. Standard will continue to send the MT messages from 20 March 2023, and will migrate to sending the CBPR+ ISO 20022 equivalents through a phased migration, post 20 March 2023. |
| Statements and notifications | MT900 MT910 MT920 MT935 MT940 MT942 MT950 |
camt.052 camt.053 camt.054 camt.060 |
Standard Bank will only send and receive the MT message format as of 20 March 2023. The transition to the CBPR+ ISO 20022 format will take place post 20 March 2023 upon conclusion of a bilateral agreement with the sending bank. The receipt of the CBPR+ ISO 20022 message is not enabled on the RMA Portal. |
| Cross Border Debits | MT204 | pacs.010 | Standard Bank will only send and receive the MT message format as of 20 March 2023. Standard Bank will migrate to sending the CBPR+ ISO 20022 equivalents upon conclusion of a bilateral agreement with the sending bank. The receipt of the CBPR+ ISO 20022 message will not be enabled on the RMA Portal. |
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