Article 10/08/21

ISO20022 Migration Case Study – Protecting Legacy Systems

Introduction

A common challenge we are asked to solve is when companies are faced with upcoming regulatory/standards changes (Target 2, Euro 1, MEPS+, P27, CBPR+) and their core systems are not compatible with the new formats.

A good example is with the upcoming Swift community migration to ISO 20022 for payments traffic due to begin at the end of 2022. This migration means that any company wishing to send/receive payments via Swift MUST be compliant with the relevant ISO 20022 messages. The migration is due to be complete in 2025 and after this date all parts of the core payments processing (along with other banking systems and departments) must be compliant with the new format. The big hurdle for companies to overcome is how to review their current infrastructure and analyse the best way to upgrade their current systems.

Implementation Costs

The big question for any organisation is what the cost will be to implement a migration? The migration review will highlight which systems require upgrading and which legacy systems are not ISO20022 compliant.  Once found, those systems will require coding/system upgrades to ensure that they can begin to send/receive the new standard. The cost of this exercise could be considerable, but what if you could keep your current infrastructure and still be ISO20022 compliant?