November 22nd 2025 marks a turning point in electronic payments. ISO 20022 becomes mandatory for cross-border transactions on the SWIFT network. It requires banks to replace traditional payment messages with a larger, data-rich format called MX. At first glance, it sounds like a technical update – something happening at the edge of banks’ infrastructure. But its impact reaches far beyond compliance. ISO 20022 isn’t just a messaging standard. It opens the door for serious modernisation in banking and finance.

A New Era for Payments

For decades, electronic payment messages have relied on formats designed in the 1970s. These are messages with rigid structures, fixed-length fields, and little room for complexity. To convey essential details, banks have often resorted to private codes and workarounds. They are greed between one another to pass on critical information about a payment.

ISO 20022 changes that paradigm, introducing a richer, more flexible, and globally standardised format. This can carry structured data seamlessly across systems. In doing so, it unlocks opportunities for better fraud detection, customer experience, and operational efficiency. These benefits extend not only to banks, but also their clients and service providers across the financial ecosystem.

Firms that haven’t properly prepared for the November deadline risk delays, disruption, and rising costs. With SWIFT charging a penalty for every payment message sent in the legacy format. But beyond compliance, many firms are overlooking the opportunities the change poses. Payments are the lifeblood of a bank, and the data they carry is a strategic asset. So how can firms turn the ISO requirement into a competitive advantage?

Product Owners and Customer Journey Managers

First, banks should use this moment to strengthen their customer journeys. Starting with a deep dive into customer pain points and breaks in the payment flows. This will involve reviewing existing customer journey maps, analysing complaints data, and gathering fresh qualitative and quantitative customer insights to uncover points of friction.

For example, unexpected delays in payments or confusion about correct tax reporting and purpose codes are common issues. Data is often at the root cause of these problems. Which is why ISO 20022’s structured data format can help fix issues. Think how tax and fee codes, transaction references, and other enriched fields could reduce ambiguity and speed up processing. Could this avoid the need for banks to contact clients for further information about the correct coding of payments made? Or prevent clients making complaints about delays and fees deducted? Beyond fixing known issues, firms can also use ISO 20022’s richer data to spot patterns. Such as correspondent banks that consistently slow down transactions. And take subsequent steps to address them.

Money Laundering Reporting Officers (MLROs)

ISO 20022 could also be a game-changer for economic crime prevention in 2026. Anti-money laundering, transaction monitoring, and other sanctions screening relies on interrogating transactional data. And their effectiveness is often only as strong as the data available.

Even seemingly simple improvements to data matter. For example, ISO 20022’s structured fields call for addresses to be stored as distinct elements like ‘street name’ and ‘country code’, rather than the generic ‘line one’ and ‘line two.’ This level of precision makes it far easier to flag suspicious activity, like multiple unrelated accounts tied to the same address, or a mismatch between the street name and country code. In other words, ISO 20022 equips banks with the granular data needed to fight financial crime more effectively.

Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) add another layer of value, enabling a specific organisation to be uniquely and consistently identified across borders, which could streamline KYC and sanctions screening processes. However, two challenges stand in the way: legacy platforms may not support ISO 20022 data, and other banks may not send useful data if it’s not mandatory, such as LEIs for non-financial institutions.

Overcoming these hurdles requires a proactive approach, with banks understanding the potential, prioritising technical upgrades that deliver the greatest compliance benefits, and collaborating with other banks and payment schemes to encourage richer data exchange. The payoff? Reduced compliance burdens and a stronger defence against economic crime.

Bank Enterprise and Data Architects

Bank enterprise and data architects have a key role to play in helping other functions understand the richness and potential value of the ISO 20022 format. Today, many banks translate data into and out of ISO 20022 as payments move through their systems. A process that introduces risk and inefficiency. Extending ISO 20022 structures deeper into internal systems avoids these pitfalls.

Updating customer-facing channels to capture payment instructions in an ISO-compliant format will ensure alignment with the structure of messages transmitted by the bank, avoiding the risks inherent with translation. It will also enable future changes, like annual updates to mandatory fields, to be implemented more easily.

Thinking of ISO 20022 as a bank-wide data standard opens the door to reducing complexity and preserving data integrity. Ultimately, ISO 20022 can be used to better describe customers, their addresses, and the relationships between parties in a transaction. While it’s only required at the boundary of a bank – where payments are sent to or received from central infrastructure – aligning internal systems with the standard unlocks additional benefits, creating a more open, flexible banking system.

Corporate Treasurers and Finance Teams

Looking beyond banks, ISO 20022’s benefits extend to customers, corporate treasurers, accounts payable, and accounts receivable teams. Improved reconciliation, better liquidity management, and greater transparency in payment processing are all within reach. ISO 20022 makes it possible to embed detailed information directly into a payment, down to the invoice line-item level. That level of precision could eliminate misallocated payments or stop transactions from bouncing back because they can’t be reconciled.

Many ERP systems already support ISO 20022 for both payment initiation and receiving confirmations and statements, making it possible to transmit and receive this enriched data. But success depends on collaboration across the entire payment chain. Customers should be encouraged to embed remittance data into their payments. Banks should ensure this information flows intact through their systems and into payment networks. And IT teams may need to upgrade ERP platforms or enable the use of ISO messages. When everyone plays their part, payments become faster, smarter, and far more reliable – turning payment operations from a source of friction into a driver of value.

FinTechs

Fintechs have a natural advantage when it comes to ISO 20022. With fewer legacy constraints, they can embed the standard into their platforms from the ground up – most have been ‘ISO-native’ from day one. The question now is how to turn that technical strength into a competitive edge.

Consider looking across the customer ecosystem – and internally – to identify opportunities to outperform the competition and deliver benefits to customers. From delivering richer data insights to enabling faster, more transparent payment experiences, firms that move beyond compliance will stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

Moving Beyond Compliance

The November deadline marks the end of the readiness phase: most banks have ensured compliance at the boundary, where systems connect to payment schemes. But the real work is only beginning.

ISO 20022 should not be seen as a technical mandate. It’s a new language for financial information, one that can unlock efficiency, transparency, and innovation across the ecosystem. We are now entering the most exciting phase; the point where true business benefits can emerge. Has your organisation considered where those opportunities lie?

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