ISO 20022 for corporates

You can use ISO 20022 to deliver benefits for your organisation. We’re helping financial institutions to streamline the cross-border payments experience for their corporate customers, by extending ISO 20022 across the entire payment chain.

With the new standard, corporates can achieve cash and treasury management goals by reducing friction and streamlining reconciliation.

FAQ: ISO 20022 for Corporates

FAQ: Swift for Corporates

• Improved reconciliation – By using structured remittance information, corporate finance and treasury teams can accelerate the reconciliation of payments and release goods earlier.
• Working capital improvements – Corporate finance and treasury teams can use richer and structured data to forecast their future inbound and outbound payment flows. This, in turn, enables companies to make better use of the funds available to them.
• Support On Behalf Of (OBO) payments – The current MT structure is not designed to efficiently support OBO payments, which have become very common in recent years. ISO 20022 messages have dedicated, structured fields to support the identification of parties, including ultimate debtor/creditor and initiating party. Corporates can take advantage of these fields to set up virtual account services.

Key actions to take

While the coexistence period for financial institutions lasts until November 2025, corporates are not required to adopt ISO 20022, however, the benefits of adoption are clear and provide a unique opportunity to simplify and improve your end-to-end processes.
 

Configure your ERP/TMS to improve straight-through processing (STP)

Configure your ERP/TMS/accounting systems to support rich and structured data for compliance and due diligence.

Adopt ISO 20022 cash reporting to ease reconciliation

Consider early adoption of ISO 20022 cash reporting to receive rich, structured data to facilitate auto-reconciliation.

Upgrade to a newer pain.001 for seamless data flow

Upgrade to a newer version of ISO 20022 payment initiation to make use of its rich, structured, and meaningful data.

Support new data for agency business models

Enable ‘on-behalf-of’ payments/collections using the ultimate party and consolidate payments and cash reporting using a concentrator model.

• A single standard, called SCORE+, enables end-to-end interoperability from the point of payment initiation to the end beneficiary. 
• Extending FINplus, the InterAct messaging service that banks use for exchanging cross-border payments, which applies  strict format validation on the network – also for corporate-to-bank payments. It also introduces a change management process aligned with the regular standards release timelines.
• Transaction Manager will support end-to-end data preservation by capturing high quality data at source. It then carries the unchanged data end-to-end, to improve reconciliation by receiving corporates.

• We’ll enable banks to offer our ready-made services to corporates. This means corporates can consume our data services, like tracking, in a fully standardised way. 
• Banks can customise the Swift experience for their corporate clients. We can help banks by enabling them to differentiate their offerings to clients while making it quick and easy to do.

Learn more about ISO 20022

Beyond payments, adopting ISO 20022 can help to ensure that corporates don’t miss out on the growing data-driven markets enabled by APIs.

We are working with the community to develop a portfolio of corporate-to-bank APIs, including one for Instant Cash Reporting. The goal is to enable more complete, instant and effective data exchange between corporates and banks. More information is available on our developer portal.

Visit the developer portal

Swift is closely involved with the Common Global Implementation Market Practice (CGI-MP), a global forum enabling market participants to agree on common implementation templates for various ISO 20022 financial messages. We continue to help consolidate CGI-MP guidelines for publication on MyStandards. 

Meanwhile, the Corporates Working Group (CWG) formulates interoperable guidelines for corporates. These are closely aligned with global market practices for ISO 20022, including Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) and the CGI-MP.

Find out more about CGI-MP Visit MyStandards

Explore our curated FAQs designed specifically for Corporate to Bank needs, providing clarity and guidance.

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