Out-Law News 1 min. read

Financial institutions to collaborate on new high value payment messaging guidelines


A number of major financial institutions are to work together to ensure financial transaction messaging is implemented in a standardised way in high value payment systems under a new initiative run by global financial network SWIFT.

SWIFT said the new taskforce will work to the existing ISO 20022 messaging standards in developing new "market practice guidelines for high value payments systems".

The guidelines are expected to be published either in the latter part of this year or early 2017 and will take account of "the evolving needs of market infrastructures and their members, including more structured, accurate and richer end-to-end data", SWIFT said.

"It creates a common foundation on which major payments market infrastructures can build their community implementations, whilst supporting global interoperability," SWIFT said.

The Bank of England, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, European Central Bank, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Société Générale are among the 15 institutions participating in the high value payments systems (HVPS) task force.

"From an industry perspective, this is a meaningful collaborative initiative that can benefit all market infrastructures and their members," Gina Russo, assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said. "By encouraging a standardised global approach to ISO 20022 implementation for high value payments systems, the industry as a whole can be in a position to reduce costs, ensure efficient implementation, and realise the true benefits of using a common global standard."

Bob Pepitone, CHIPS product manager at The Clearing House (TCH) payments company, which is participating in the new taskforce, said The Clearing House is adopting ISO 20022 as "its preferred messaging standard for real-time and high-value payments".

"As we prepare our implementation strategy to convert our proprietary CHIPS format specifications to ISO 20022, we would like to use this new global market practice as a baseline," Pepitone said. "This will allow our members to use the same formats and processes with TCH and other HVP communities, while incorporating the unique characteristics of the CHIPS messaging formats. This approach will definitely help to enable interoperability for all payments market infrastructures globally."

Earlier this year Payments UK announced its endorsement of new ISO 20022 message guidelines aimed at facilitating real-time payments.

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