News and Insights

In an article for The Paypers, Deutsche Bank’s Christian Westerhaus discusses the future of payment messaging

January 14, 2020

Change is afoot across the global payments landscape. Pinging on the radars of market participants for some time, the fast-approaching November 2021 migration of the world’s primary payment market infrastructures (MIs) to the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard is now looming large.

The new standard affects all banks with many-to-many relationships in the correspondent banking space and all users of payments and cash management messages (MT categories 1, 2 and 9). While the project does not extend to corporate-to-bank traffic and is not mandatory for market infrastructures operating a closed user group in FIN (MI-CUG) formats, the implications for corporates will nevertheless be significant.

This is not simply “another IT project” for banks, nor is it “just another bank project” for corporates. In the coming months, all market participants will need to take appropriate steps to assess and prepare for the upcoming transition.

The article can be viewed here.