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The global financial system has crossed a decisive threshold with the full-scale shift to ISO 20022, marking the end of the long coexistence with the legacy MT messaging format and the beginning of a richer, more interoperable standard for global payments.
ISO 20022 goes fully live
The cutover, completed on 22 November, caps years of coordinated work across banks, market infrastructures and the wider Swift community, and positions the industry for the next phase of digital transformation.
ISO 20022
At its core, ISO 20022 replaces terse, inflexible messages with structured, granular data that can be used consistently across borders.
That greater detail is expected to support the G20’s goals for faster, cheaper and more transparent international payments, while also smoothing the customer experience in today’s fiat-based systems.
Yesterday’s data from Swift indicated that 97 per cent of all payment instructions were already being sent natively via ISO 20022, with an interim conversion service in place to ensure stragglers do not disrupt flows.
For financial institutions, the implications run deeper than simply adopting a new message format.
Richer data should strengthen compliance and screening, reduce false positives, enhance risk controls and increase automation across middle and back offices.
The format’s extensibility also means it can evolve alongside new use cases—an attribute that regulators and global standard-setters have repeatedly underlined as essential for the next generation of digital money.
Jerome Piens, chief operations officer at Swift, framed the milestone as a foundation for something larger: not only a more reliable experience for retail and corporate customers, but also the infrastructure required for future innovations such as tokenised assets and shared ledgers.
Swift’s strategic initiatives—ranging from a global payment scheme to blockchain-based transaction rails—ultimately rely on data standards that can carry unambiguous information end-to-end.
With the transition complete, the emphasis now shifts from technical readiness to value extraction.
Swift and domestic payment operators are rolling out guidance, analytics and tooling to help banks optimise their use of ISO 20022, measure data quality, and identify new efficiencies or product opportunities built on structured information.
RTGS.global Expands Network with 23 Additional Currencies
While ISO 20022 equips the industry with a universal language, private infrastructure providers are racing to build faster highways for the money itself.
RTGS.global, a cross-border settlement network designed to eliminate Herstatt risk, has added 23 currencies to its platform, enabling participating institutions to settle transactions instantaneously through a single API.
The system functions as an orchestration layer that bypasses time-zone cut-offs, correspondent banking chains and limited business hours—issues that still trap an estimated $3 trillion to $5 trillion in daily payments within slow or risky processes.
Its latest expansion is powered by a partnership with TransferMate, which connects RTGS.global participants to multiple local clearing systems and major currencies through one integration.
Marcus Treacher, the company’s executive chairman and chief executive, likens the development to building a global motorway system: replacing winding, congested routes with direct, predictable and secure links for financial institutions.
With the technology already in production and now scalable across a broader currency set, RTGS.global aims to provide a collective uplift for banks and payment firms seeking to modernise cross-border flows.
Together, the universal adoption of ISO 20022 and the rapid evolution of real-time settlement networks signal a decisive acceleration in the modernisation of international payments—where data, speed and interoperability are emerging as the defining competitive advantages.
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