Deborah
On September 9, the Bank for International Settlements’ Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (BIS-CPMI) published an article on the topic of harmonisation of ISO 20022. While the ISO 20022 standard will promote interoperability to enhance cross-border payments, differing deployment – such as misaligned message flows, inconsistent data use and lack of development by end customers – creates inefficiencies in the end-to-end payment process.
Challenges to adopting harmonised requirements include:
complexity of aligning domestic requirements with global requirements
timeline to make the required changes
cost implications of undertaking this work at both the industry and participant level
To promote harmonisation, the CPMI will provide high-level minimum requirements to be introduced in 2025. These requirements will cover data fields, such as standardisation of:
structured data options and code information
person / entity/ financial institution identification
Unique End-To-End Reference (UETR)
remittance information
These requirements would reduce likelihood of errors, improve reconciliation, facilitate straight-through processing and enable automated compliance screening.
Comments to this article are requested by October 21 and are to be sent to cpmi@bis.org with "ISO 20022 harmonisation" in the subject line.