The ISO 20022 message standard
The financial services industry is moving to ISO 20022 message standards and the market infrastructures and user groups have committed to using the format in both the payments and settlement domains.
Central Securities Depositories (CSDs) now supports the use of ISO messages for both the clearing and settlement of European Cross Border transactions. To date Geld Service Austria, Bank of England and ESMA have already opted to use it for regulatory reporting purposes.
While the principle of ISO 20022 is to create an industrywide standard, there are aspects to the implementation of these standards that can be challenging, for example, the implementation of the ISO Bank to Customer Cash Management message (Camt) can vary based on the underlying infrastructure provider, whether it be SWIFT, SEPA, Target2, SIX Chaps or RTGS.
On 01 July 2021, the European Central Bank (ECB) Market Infrastructure Board directed that there needs to be a full fledged implementation of the ISO 20022 message format by November 2022, with no further pursuit of a ‘like-for-like’ fallback solution.
Smartstream is ready with market leading technology to support these transformational market changes. TLM Aurora Advanced Account Control is Smartstream’s next generation reconciliation solution and for early adopters this sets the foundation for competitive advantage by utilising the data granularity of ISO 20022 messages.
