Is the industry ready for the ISO 20022 switch?
On 22 November this year, a long-looming deadline for the industry will arrive: Swift will cease support for legacy Message Type (MT) messaging, putting an end to the period of coexistence between it and new ISO 20022-compliant Message XML (MX) messaging that has been in place for the last two years.
Adoption of ISO 20022, which we broke down in detail in this earlier report, has already been growing. In February 2025, Swift saw the global daily average number of ISO 20022 payment instructions sent on its FINplus service reach 1.54 million, despite having only reached a million around nine months earlier, with over 165+ countries sending and over 220 receiving with the new standard.
In addition to conducting an extensive and exhaustive campaign to drive adoption of the new system, Swift has also created what it describes as “a temporary last-resort contingency plan” that will see a conversion service in place for critical low-volume MT payment instructions, as well as an optional in-flow translation of ISO 20022 messages for receivers not fully prepared to handle incoming messages with the new format, although both will incur a charge.
However, in the majority of cases, if a financial institution tries to send an MT message after the deadline, it will fail without Swift being able to access its instruction to explain why and the sender will need to repair it and re-send.
The next few months will therefore see significant activity as the industry completes the move to ISO 20022. Swift maintains that it expects its top 175 senders, who are responsible for 86% of its payment instructions, to complete the move by its November deadline, although has not provided forecasts for the remaining 14%.
This still means a significant step up from current rates. February 2025 saw just 35% of cross-border payment messages sent using ISO 20022, one percentage point higher than January and nine percentage points ahead of August 2024. However, adoption will need to climb by a further five percentage points to reach Swift’s 40% target for the end of Q1 2025 and from there the industry will need to ramp up adoption sharply to stay on track for the November deadline.
While many major institutions have already made considerable progress in this area, with Swift profiling the efforts of Barclays, the Bank of Cyprus, DBS Bank and Diamond Trust Bank as recent success stories, there are those that still have considerable work to do. For example, in February The Federal Reserve announced that it was pushing back its implementation of ISO 20022 for its Fedwire Funds Service from March to July, citing insufficient customer readiness and industry requests.
We’ll be keeping a close watch on adoption rates as the November deadline looms closer, so stay tuned.
How can my bank develop its cross-border payments strategy?
