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.