Across the payments world, from conference stages to the boardrooms and back offices of banks, ISO 20022 has truly dominated the agenda, inspiring both admiration and anxiety in those tasked with implementation.
It has been a unifying journey around the world, and unlike the specifics of country-by-country payment compliance preparations, as with something like the SEPA regulations in Europe, or the Retail Payments Activities Act in Canada, this has affected everyone, everywhere, all at once.
Its dividends have been heralded by both public and private sector officials. The Bank of England’s payments chief Victoria Cleland hailed the benefits as “huge”, adding that the new messaging standard has the “the potential to create a single common language for most payments globally”, and meanwhile, Standard Chartered cash management chief Mahesh Kini praisedthe standard for providing “a data-rich foundation that reduces payments friction and enhances the interoperability of systems for seamless cross-border transactions”.
However, while the imminent November 2025 deadline marks a significant milestone in its global roll-out, payment professionals should be under absolutely no illusion that this is the end of the road.
Rather, this is the beginning of the next chapter in a multi-year project. At Sibos in Frankfurt earlier this year, the CBPR+ working group shared a roadmap until 2030, which provides banks with a unique opportunity to look into the future as to what lies ahead, rather than relying on annual releases.
The real challenge lies in fine-tuning systems, aligning data practices, and realising what the standard’s full potential can be long after its go-live.
Here are Paylume‘s five key takes for what lies ahead on the ISO journey.
Implementation doesn’t equal optimisation
By November 22, 2025, most payment systems will technically support ISO 20022 messaging, but early adoption has been focused on compliance, not enhancement.
Many financial institutions will inevitably still be sending simplified or truncated messages due to the use of translation, and there is fragmentation.
For payment service providers, this next chapter means improving data quality, consistency, and completeness so that the richer data that ISO 20022 promised can actually deliver operational and analytical value to firms that can yield better results and more efficiency. Concretely, the use of rich data elements is poised to reduce financial crime compliance and false positives, and to enable corporates to optimise their payments reconciliation.
Cross-border harmonisation is a work in progress, not work complete
ISO 20022 was designed as a universal financial messaging standard, but challenges with global alignment on a project like this are always inevitable.
Financial markets, their regulators, and their infrastructures are adopting it at different speeds and with varying usage guidelines that reflect local priorities and the legacy constraints that exist.
Many market infrastructures are still on different base message versions of the ISO standard. Updates have been infrequent, and SEPA for instance, has only updated its base messaging since the inception of the SEPA messaging standards in 2024. As part of the CPMI recommendations, it is anticipated that market infrastructures will align on base messaging standards and update these on an annual basis.
This will reduce fragmentation and benefit banks that are operating across multiple jurisdictions. However, this will also potentially increase costs for banks that are only operating in a single jurisdiction.
Achieving seamless interoperability, where data moves across borders with both technical precision and regulatory decorum, will demand continued collaboration, harmonisation, and refinement. This collaboration between banks, local payment systems, and regulators will be crucial, and important work has already been undertaken by international working groups like CBPR+, HVPS+, and IP+.
The migration date is not the finish line here, but a benchmark on the path to making ISO 20022 the predominant global payments language.
The innovation phase kickstarts after go-live
Once the underlying infrastructure is in place, banks can begin developing smarter, more intuitive payment experiences.
Richer remittance data and structured information will flow consistently, and the possibilities here extend much further beyond compliance, firms whether that is real-time reconciliation or frictionless cross-border reporting, not to mention better customer insights and product innovation that is driven by much more informative data.
The deadline represents the technical foundation on which this payments metamorphosis will be constructed, but the real value of ISO 20022 will emerge in the years that follow, as institutions turn technical readiness into strategic and competitive advantage.
Regulatory compliance potential will take time to be realised
What has been promoted by the likes of the Federal Reserve, Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlementsis that ISO 20022’s structured data provides major potential to improve AML, sanctions screening, and fraud detection.
Politicians and regulatory officials around the world are keen to see these pivotal compliance expectations undertaken in a coherent manner, and the ISO standard is a demonstrative tool for achieving this.
Regulators now expect firms to leverage ISO 20022 data for transparency and risk management; this will likely mean more regulatory scrutiny once the November 22 has passed.
The FATF’s June 2025 updates to Recommendation 16 also complement ISO 20022’s objectives. Both have been developed to increase the transparency, traceability, and data quality of cross-border payments.
The structured message format allows sender and beneficiary details, such as name, address, and date of birth, to be captured in consistent, machine-readable fields, supporting FATF’s new requirements.
Meanwhile, it also bridges incumbent banks and fintechs through a common data language, reinforcing the G20’s cross-border payment ambitions.
So, ultimately, the regulatory compliance potential will take time to be realised. FATF has set out its expectations, the G20 has defined the goals, and ISO 20022 can provide the technical foundation to achieve them herein.
November 2025 isn’t the final deadline
As the migration of payment‑instruction messages to ISO 20022 progresses, attention shifts to key milestones.
For payment systems like CHAPS in the UK, and the TARGET systems in the EU, it is from November 2026 that fully unstructured addresses will be rejected in the payment validation process, reinforcing the drive for more structured, high‑quality data.
Meanwhile, SWIFT’s roadmap for exceptoons and investigations (E&I) messages mandates that all institutions must receive the investigation‑request message by November 2026 and achieve full send/receive capability by November 2027.
What was implemented in the past is no longer a possibility. Whereas many banks have relied on format translation to be compliant with the ISO deadline, the introduction of new ISO messages and rich data fields will require banks to revisit such tactical solutions and replace them with ISO native architectures.
The onus will be on embedding end‑to‑end data integrity, maintaining evolving message and schema updates, and coordinating across the payment chain. Ahead of these deadlines, institutions should strengthen data governance, update onboarding to meet structured‑data requirements, and enhance analytics and controls.
Early action will help ensure compliance and unlock the full operational and data‑quality benefits of ISO 20022 as it gradually becomes business as usual around the world.
Data monetisation begins now for many banks, and over the coming weeks, Paylume will continue to delve into some of the most pivotal issues for the industry in adapting to the new global norm for payment messaging.
