Via Trade Treasury Payments by Deepesh Patel
The shift to ISO 20022 marks one of the most significant changes in global financial infrastructure in decades. ISO 20022 is a universal messaging standard that uses structured, machine-readable XML data to describe financial transactions. It replaces SWIFT’s legacy MT (Message Type) format, which has been in use for more than 40 years and relies on unstructured text fields with limited capacity for automation and analytics.
SWIFT introduced ISO 20022 for cross-border payments and reporting (CBPR+) on 20 March 2023, launching a three-year coexistence period in which both MT and ISO 20022 (MX) messages could be exchanged. This period ends on 22 November 2025, when SWIFT will retire MT messages in Categories 1, 2, and 9 in bank-to-bank communication. After that date, all cross-border payments, bank-to-bank transfers, and cash-management messages must be sent and received in ISO 20022 format.
These categories include common flows such as MT103 (customer credit transfer) and MT202 (bank transfer), which are being replaced by pacs.008 and pacs.009, as well as MT940 statements, now superseded by camt.053.
For banks, corporates, and treasurers, the migration enables richer, more consistent data for reconciliation, sanctions screening, and analytics. For the wider trade, treasury, and payments (TTP) ecosystem, ISO 20022 creates opportunities to enhance supply-chain visibility, improve straight-through processing, and align cross-border and domestic systems under a single standard.
BAFT’s ISO 20022 Migration Lessons Learned paper, drawing on insights from leading global banks, outlines key takeaways from this transformation. The following ten lessons summarise what has worked, where challenges remain, and how institutions can prepare for the final phase.