Introduction

The deadline for the CBPR+ (cross-border payment and reporting) coexistence period is November 22, 2025. After this date, Swift will end the coexistence period for financial institution to financial institution cross-border payment instructions, and only the ISO 20022 message format will be supported.

This means that all parts of the core payments processing (along with other downstream systems and departments) must be compliant with this format which is proving to be a challenge/opportunity for companies to review their current infrastructure and analyse the best way to upgrade their current systems at their own pace.

A European Financial Institution who is a key player in the private sector to drive cross-border trade (Client) engaged with Trace Financial and selected Transformer to solve their ISO 20022  migration requirement to be ready before this deadline and beyond.

The Client connects to Swift and identified that their payment and down-stream legacy systems are not ISO 20022 compliant and so needed a solution in place to protect this from the new ISO 20022 messages that will be delivered post the November deadline.

An additional challenge is that when converting ISO 20022 > Swift MT data truncation may occur due to the discrepancies between the larger fields allowed in ISO 20022 against the smaller legacy MT fields.  An additional report would need to be generated once the transformation has occurred to enable the Client to store all the information sent within their payment system.

Their goal was to create a Transformation Layer where a solution would be able to

• Seamlessly convert MT<>MX out of the box
• Provide a no-code UI/Designer to apply their own business rules by their Business team
• To be deployed within their current technical infrastructure
• Future-proof, to be easily maintainable while legacy systems are updated

Drivers for Change

Implementation Costs

The biggest challenge to any firm is what the cost will be to implement such a strategy as they highlight which systems require upgrading, issues such as legacy systems not being ISO 20022 compliant and therefore requiring coding/system upgrades to ensure that they can begin to send/receive this standard head the costs and make this migration a costly project to achieve, however, what if you could keep your current infrastructure but still be ISO 20022 compliant?

Transformer allows you to be fluent in ISO 20022 (or any message format) whilst protecting your legacy systems.

A strategy for ISO 20022 payments

At the infrastructure level the settlement of payments is moving towards ISO 20022 at a growing pace

Because many participants want to keep using legacy systems and formats, the initial ISO 20022 roll-outs were mostly adopting a ‘like for like’ approach, where ISO 20022 messages only use fields and capabilities that have equivalents in currently-used messages, primarily SWIFT MT standards.

Post deadline the extra data available in ISO 20022 will be demanded, and at this point MT-ISO 20022 conversion solutions will need to be updated, whether by enriching the ISO 20022 message with data not in the MT message, or building the ISO 20022 message directly from payment transaction data.

Future proofing and eliminating risk from solutions on the market for other translation products/services

Managing the multi-year transition from SWIFT MT and ISO 20022 formats will be a challenging requirement for many projects. The rules specifying these conversions are very complex and there are many options available and the goal is to identify the best approach.

Clients was presented with many different solutions

• An internal build
• Purchasing prebuilt CBPR+ mappings as a black-box solution
• Subscribing to the Swift inflight translation model that is introduced in January 1^st 2026

These 3 options were rejected for several reasons:

Attempting to create your own MT<>ISO 20022 mappings was not a viable factor with the time/resources presented.

Purchasing prebuilt non-extensible MT<>MX mappings would not only be a costly initial endeavour but more importantly maintaining/adapting these standards while the ISO 20022 formats continue to evolve would result in a costly resource drain from the Business and Technical team that would need to maintain/adapt the black-box solution via additional code outside the provided solution.

Using the Swift’s paid inflight translation post January 1^st 2026 has an inherent risk attached based on the future charges escalating and an unknown end date for this service to be available to the community.

Data Truncation functionality and reporting

Transformers prebuilt MT<>ISO 20022 mapping libraries adhere to the industry standards with regards truncation from ISO 20022 > MT and comes out of the box with any of our libraries.

However, Customers do not just wish data truncation to occur when needed but to identify what has been truncated and then report/document.

This report can take many different methods such as

• Report – This could either use industry standard message types to document the fields that have been truncated or bespoke formats designed by the customer for Transformer to then populate.
• Database – Transformer (using JDBC) would connect to the database directly to enrich the tables of the truncated data or to populate tables detailing the missing data from the MT output.
• API – Transformer would call the API (either hosted locally or outside the customers environment) to post the data that had been truncated

Using Transformer’s no-code GUI users can still invoke the prebuilt ISO 20022>MT mappings and then use the information provided by this to then populate any solution the Client requires from the list above (or any other method of choosing).

Transformer as the solution

Leap ahead with ready-built MT<>ISO 20022 mappings

Conversion between SWIFT MT and ISO 20022 formats will be a challenging requirement for many projects. The rules specifying these conversions are very complex, so attempting to create your own MT-ISO 20022 mappings could be a huge task.

Using Transformer, simply start with the full set of high-quality MT-ISO 20022 mappings we’ve already built for you. You can quickly and easily customise them to meet specific project needs within our no-code Designer.

No-code, Easily Extensible Message/Mapping Libraries

Out of the box any prebuilt library provided with Transformer is fully “extensible” in our no-code GUI.  We understand that every customer has different business requirements needs and our solution allows you to adapt these libraries to any requirements within our no-code GUI.

Data Truncation Functionality

Our prebuilt CBPR+ Mapping Library enables users to easily identify which fields from ISO 20022>MT have been truncated.  In any implementation the reporting of this is different for each client and so once the Client is able to explain the reporting method (in this case it was a bespoke XML file) then the logic is implemented in our no-code GUI to build a transformation that invokes the CBPR+ mapping and then populate this truncation report.

Deploy anywhere

Transformer’s simple API and its range of specialised service builders allow solutions to be deployed rapidly into any integration architecture, including OSGi, development frameworks such as Java or .NET, RESTful service containers and traditional Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)/Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) architectures. Each deployment is independent and thread-safe, allowing for complete scalability within the overall architecture.

Transformer has been qualified on platforms ranging from Windows servers to Linux and Unix, and is available from both Java and .NET runtimes.

Transformer also includes a range of functions to facilitate the product’s use with Apache Camel, the open-source integration framework. For example, special-purpose mapping actions simplify interactions with Camel message Headers and Exchanges, while a Camel/OSGi specific service builder simplifies deployment to a few clicks.

Transformer – The strategic answer to ISO20022

All these resources combine to ensure that Transformer the most powerful way to handle advanced standards such as ISO 20022 and enable projects to build solutions that are delivered fast, to a high quality, and which stay maintainable in the longer term.