Swift Works on Harmonizing ISO 20022 Adoption

Messaging standards industry cooperative Swift is now focusing on harmonizing adoption of the ISO 20022 messaging standard, says Malene McMahon, senior business manager at Swift.

The need for harmonization has emerged because Swift had allowed flexibility for adoption of ISO 20022 throughout multiple infrastructures in different communities, nations and markets, adds McMahon.

"We are reaching a global tipping point," she says. "We have very large clients who have to interface with infrastructures [globally] and they are now looking to find a more harmonized way to do this."

Beginning at Swift's Sibos conference last year, the cooperative began bringing together infrastructures that had adopted ISO 20022 to discuss conforming to a single, worldwide version of the standard.

"It's about agreeing to implement the same version, to follow the global market practice, to publish their guidelines on the MyStandards platform, so everyone in the world can see the same guidelines in the same way," says McMahon.

Progress in harmonization of the ISO 20022 standard will better support regulatory reporting, she adds. "ISO 20022 could now be the basis for a lot of the new regulatory reporting," says McMahon.