“ISO 20022 has defined the language. The challenge now is banks must actively use it by fully populating structured and optional data fields,” says Gherri D’Innocenzo, Head of Cash Management & Payments, Standards & Projects, Siemens.
“Only then can corporates unlock the full [data carrying –Ed.] potential of ISO 20022 in payments and in areas such as reconciliation, cash application, reporting and straight-through processing (STP).”
Swift’s planned November 2026 update covering the move to structured postal data and US Fedwire’s own alignment with the data-centric move are designed to get more out of the adoption of ISO 20022 as the global technical ‘linga franca’ of international payments and finance. This is needed in the face of its long-running gestation since the first decade of the millennium, causing frustration among corporate treasurers around the slow implementation.
Getting full data advantage
“The remaining challenges of ISO 20022 are no longer format driven but clearly data driven,” adds D’Innocenzo. In other words, getting the most out of it is now key. The core issue is not the availability of the standard, but that required data is often missing. In particular, banks frequently provide only mandatory elements in reporting messages such as camt.053, while optional yet fully standardised and structured fields remain unused – even though it’s these fields where corporates derive value. Limited and selective data provisioning is currently the main bottleneck for automation and efficiency. For corporates the use of postal address data under the ISO 20022 framework is therefore less a technical Swift matter and more a question of end-to-end data ownership,” continues D’Innocenzo.
“This requires consistent counterparty data models, clear alignment between ERP systems and the in-house bank (IHB), and reliable ‘data pass through’ from banking partners into account statements. Without this, the full operational benefits of ISO 20022 cannot be realised. The planned November 2026 standards update is an important step for the wider market. From a Siemens perspective, however, it’s not transformational as our internal data models and processes are already prepared.” Siemens moved to the standard internally last decade when the single euro payments area (SEPA) harmonisation drive was introduced into Europe. November may be challenging for others.
“The relevance of the November 2026 standards update lies primarily in driving greater market consistency and discipline.”
Postal address challenge
According to Gareth Lodge, Principal Analyst at Celent, banks and vendors need to get used to regular updates. “But the biggest remaining challenge is postal addresses,” he says. “Many banks saw the US and Swift platform migrations last year as ‘just’ a payments and deadline thing. But the data is used up and downstream – few banks store postal addresses in the way they need to for ISO’s purposes, so most will now struggle to figure out how to address the address challenge. To give an example, in a CRM system you’d store an address as first line, second line, town, country, postal code. The new format however [in the November 2026 update] breaks it down into 14 structured fields.”
“Therefore, you need to split the existing data and make sure they go in the correct fields,” explains Lodge. “Some countries have the building number at the end. Some have letters not numbers. A more structured approach will yield other advantages as well – for instance, on know your customer (KYC) and other compliance end uses, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) intergovernmental stipulations on money laundering (AML) and terrorist financing (CFT). The prior November 2025 Swift connectivity deadline allowed some unstructured fields. But by November 2026, its pretty much all structured data that is required.”
US ISO 20022 migration successful
“Given the scale and difficulty of a project like this, the recent US integration work using its new US Fedwire Funds Service and CHIPS payment platforms as drivers to compel ISO 20022 usage among those connecting, went remarkably well,” says Lodge. “Particularly, considering US vendors were less experienced with ISO 20022 than other global providers. Not every bank was 100% ready, but that was expected. It went down to the wire (pun intended) but they got there. However, my understanding is that few corporates have made the change themselves. They still see it as a bank problem.” This implies corporate treasuries left it to banks to fully adopt ISO 20022 in US payment processing, without doing so themselves internally on their own operations, or deploying it on compliance or other treasury end uses. The full potential of the messaging standard’s rich data-carrying capabilities is not therefore being utilised.
Core payments processing benefits
According to D’Innocenzo, the core benefits of ISO 20022 are:
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Standardisation.
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Transparency.
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Automation at scale.
“At Siemens, these benefits translate into tangible operational improvements across daily treasury processes,” he says. “Using ISO 20022 bank-to-customer reporting, such as camt.053, Siemens was able to identify transactions based on a business transaction code. This has materially increased STP and reduced manual cash application and exception handling. In practical terms, this type of standardisation leads to double digit reductions in manual reconciliations and a visible improvement in cash application quality driven by structured remittance information.”
Internal treasury benefits
“ISO 20022 is a key enabler for real-time treasury integration,” continues D’Innocenzo. “It defines the structured financial data model, while APIs provide real-time access to data. Together, they allow treasury processes such as balance updates, payment status information and transaction confirmations to shift from end-of-day batch processing to near real-time visibility. This enables:
“Taken together, ISO 20022 forms the data backbone for global internal payment factories, IHBs and scalable real-time treasury operating models, while APIs act as the delivery mechanism that turns structured data into actionable insight.”
Mansour Davarian, Head of Transaction Banking Solutions at Lloyds Bank, is in agreement, pointing out that at the most basic level: “ISO 20022 helps to ease the operational burden on corporate treasurers by elevating the value of transaction data. Purchase codes, regulatory information and remittance details can be transmitted in structured and recognisable fields, improving STP and enabling automation,” he says. “Overall, this makes for a faster, more efficient end-to-end payment process, which provides better cash visibility and tighter working capital management.”
Future benefits
“Future benefits are likely to be driven by ecosystem maturity, with ISO 20022 forming the data backbone for advanced analytics, AI-driven treasury tools, real-time cross-border operations and interoperability between traditional cash and digital assets,” says Davarian. The ability of APIs to act as an easy means of connectivity and data exchange across borders, partners and systems escalates the benefits.
Remaining challenges
“One remaining challenge is timing,” continues Davarian. “While a significant proportion of payment initiation traffic migrated in November 2025, traditional MT940 and MT950 statement messages are not scheduled for full deprecation until 2028. This creates a multi-year transition gap, during which enriched ISO 20022 payment data exists, but may not be consistently reflected in all transaction reporting everywhere.” However, as Celent’s Lodge points out: “Most instant payment systems implemented in the last 15 years now run on ISO 20022. Most Wire systems now run on it too. Not all, but by volume the vast majority of infrastructure platforms use it [spurring uptake –Ed.]. Traditional automated clearing houses (ACH) largely don’t use ISO 20022 natively yet. They do in the European SEPA region, but that is because of the regulation.”
ACH and global picture
In the US [NACHA] or the UK [Bacs], which process direct debits and payroll on ACH messaging, ISO 20022 still isn’t natively present. The UK’s alternative instant Faster Payment Service (FPS) platform is also not ISO 20022 capable yet. It still uses an old ATM and card-based messaging standard. The UK is awaiting its delayed national payments vision (NPV) refresh to come into fruition to change this. “It’s also worth noting that the present UK ACH standard is used by more than 100,000 corporates due to direct submission,” adds Lodge.
“The ACH association looked at migration years ago and chose not to adopt ISO 20022, but to offer an ISO 20022 mapping service [US] instead, so those who wanted could send and receive in ISO 20022. Many big banks do, but not all. If all your other payments are ISO 20022, some of ACH too, then I imagine eventually the big banks will push hard to fully move to it everywhere.”
Separately, the G20 Roadmap has been a driver for global adoption of the standard and of faster, more transparent secure payments. Its cross-border payments interoperability and extension (PIE) taskforce is still seeking to engender ISO 20022 harmonisation and global uptake. “It’s inevitable ACH in most countries will change at some point. But the economics of doing so are far from clear.” Who pays? “An analogy is the railway system. If we started over today, we’d put the stations in different places, have different track and train sizes. But the cost of change is monumental, and while there is RoI it’s over years, rather than months.”
Is 20022 still relevant?
According to Siemens’ D’Innocenzo: “ISO 20022 remains highly relevant, even as DLT-based payment solutions, tokenised money and internet native protocols arise. ISO 20022 serves as the shared global data and messaging standard across traditional FMIs, instant payment schemes and emerging technologies. It provides a consistent foundation for interoperability, scalability and globally aligned payment and treasury processes.” ISO 20022 can ensure new digital and machine-to-machine payment use cases and protocols can be integrated, reported, reconciled and controlled within corporate treasury and ERP environments. In that sense, it is not displaced by internet native payment protocols, such as Coinbase’s X402 on stablecoins or other such offerings.
ISO 20022 supplies the structured financial language required for settlement, referencing, reporting and interoperability across treasury processes, and will continue to do so. “ISO 20022 should be understood as a strategic data and standardisation initiative, not an IT exercise,” concludes D’Innocenzo. “Corporates that proactively adopted ISO 20022 globally are now able to integrate new national payment systems seamlessly, while those treating it as a bank imposed deadline will continue to lag in unlocking its full value.”
Internal adoption helps. Siemens can act as a beacon in this regard for the benefits of native ISO 20022 and widescale industry adoption.
