ISO20022, also known as the universal financial industry message scheme, is the platform proposed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to develop all financial messages. It is not a suite of message standards, but a recipe to develop message standards for all domains in the financial industry.

Capco has recently started to lead a multi-year payment transformation program for one of the UK’s biggest banks to transition the bank’s payment infrastructure to ISO20022 standards. We supported the bank to establish a target architecture state and implement foundational solution components that helped our client to offer real-time domestic interbank payments to their customers, using ISO20022 messages. These foundational solution components that we delivered have further enabled the bank to extend the ISO20022 adoption in their organization into offering real-time payments for other geographies and payment types.

Based on this first-hand experience, we have numerous lessons learned and careful considerations about how the existing payments architecture landscape of banks can be evolved towards adopting ISO20022 standards.

In this article discover our six solution considerations that will ensure banks looking to adopt ISO20022 standards for payments to achieve the long-term ‘convergence’ towards a single ISO20022 standard, and at the same time also facilitate short-term ‘coexistence’ of several standards to provide a workable series
of transition architectures.

For more information about ISO20022, and how Capco are helping to digitally transform and enhance organizations all across the financial services landscape, please contact Alla Gancz, Partner & UK Head of Capco Digital.