November 2025 was a landmark moment in financial services, as it marked the end of a lengthy and complex transition to standardise global payment messaging for cross-border payments. The ISO 20022 standards have replaced older MT messages with more structured ‘MX’ messages for improved data, automated straight-through-processing of payments, and compliance across the Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network, which connects more than 11,500 institutions in over 200 countries.
The migration process began in March 2023 through the release of 15 usage guidelines for certain message types and marked the beginning of a ‘coexistence’ period for institutions to use both MT and MX messaging, during which time more guidelines were released to cover all message types. emagine have provided specialist delivery expertise to a number of financial services clients during this period to help ensure a smooth transition
The coexistence period ended, as planned, on 22 November 2025, with many challenges overcome and lessons learned, and yet the Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) chapter is not yet closed, as we explore in this article.
Read more about ISO 20022 standard here
What are the opportunities?
November 2025 represented a crucial implementation milestone in the journey to achieve a globally standardised payments ecosystem via the adoption of ISO 20022 standards.
Even before the deadline, early adopters started to realise the benefits of improved standardisation and interoperability. This includes enhanced automated straight-through-processing of payments, pre-validation controls as well as payments tracking and reconciliation capabilities. This, in turn, enables improved visibility on cash flows while reducing the need for costly and error-prone manual intervention.
The updated ISO standard facilitates highly structured messages with richer data attributes in comparison to its legacy MT counterpart. From a risk and compliance perspective, banks are, therefore, much better equipped to unlock improved insights from their payments data, thereby enabling them to undertake significantly enhanced fraud detection, transaction monitoring and anti-money laundering screening.
Key learnings
It is crucial to recognise, however, that the success of the CBPR+ initiative is heavily dependent on collaboration and coordination across the whole industry. While it is critical for impacted banks now to be compliant, a number of these institutions’ corporate clients, for example, might not have fully transitioned to the new standards by November.
This will have an impact on a number of associated processes. For example, compliance monitoring may not be as effective given the underlying data may be lost or truncated in converting from ISO 20022 to legacy MT standards.
To unlock the full range of benefits, the entire financial services industry needs to successfully adopt the ISO 20022 standards
Numerous Financial Institutions likely made compromises and trade-offs to adapt legacy systems within the payments process in order to comply with the ISO20022 regulatory deadline. Moving forward, these compromises may continue to impede the complete adoption of ISO20022’s enhanced data features, such as Structured Remittance Information and upcoming initiatives like ISO20022 Data Harmonization.
As the industry has fully adopted ISO20022 Payments Messages, financial institutions should now begin leveraging enhanced data capabilities to deliver real customer value through features such as Structured Remittance Information, LEI, Purpose Code, etc.
To support the transition for the industry as a whole, Swift has built selective and chargeable short-term contingency measures to help manage and mitigate the risk of phased adoption and ensure business continuity now that the coexistence period has ended.
Read more about the contingency measures here
This will have an impact on a number of associated processes. For example, compliance monitoring may not be as effective given the underlying data may be lost or truncated in converting from ISO 20022 to legacy MT standards.
However, we have identified three key considerations for firms that have opted to delay the adoption of ISO in favor of continuing with MT. These include:
- There is an additional fee charged by Swift to facilitate the conversion between the two standards
- Delayed adoption means there is an increased risk of failure or rejection, because the legacy MT format messages may not have the relevant data elements to facilitate successful conversion to ISO
- There is an increase in processing times. These also come with a higher likelihood of costly manual intervention being required, resulting in a further slowdown of payments processing in a market where users have high expectations in relation to speed of service
These three factors may ultimately result in significant reputational and commercial implications for financial service businesses, as well as their clients. In addition, certain message types have already been removed since the end of the coexistence period. It is, therefore, important to note that Swift’s transitional arrangements are not meant to be long-term or alternative solutions. To unlock the full range of benefits, the entire financial services industry needs to successfully adopt the ISO 20022 standards.
Future deadlines
Looking ahead, the next deadline around the CBPR+ initiative concerns unstructured postal addresses, which will be retired and forbidden in November 2026. Swift advises that fully structured or hybrid postal addresses must be used from this date, and that certain message types will no longer function thereafter.
The ISO 20022 postal address element is another crucial step for financial institutions to ensure better data quality, efficiency and regulatory compliance. It enables the proper identification of parties in financial transactions and provides a standardised format for address information to ensure consistency and accuracy across different systems and countries.
Learn more about the postal address (Swift)
About the author
Mehak Nagpal
Head of UK Practices