After a year and a half of coexistence with MT messages, ISO 20022 is officially mandatory for all financial institutions conducting cross-border transactions through major payment networks like SWIFT.
The Association for Finance Professionals’ 2024 Payment Fraud and Control Survey Report found that fewer than 25% of organizations successfully recovered 75% or more of their funds lost to payment fraud. While ISO 20022 compliance isn’t mandatory for corporate partners, banks are beginning to phase out legacy formats, effectively requiring organizations to adopt modern payment standards to enhance payment transparency and improve fraud detection.
For finance and treasury professionals, the question is less “should we migrate to ISO 20022 standards” — for future-focused organizations that use major payment networks and operate globally, the answer is likely yes. The more productive question is “should we build this in-house or outsource to a trusted partner?”
The three main factors that guide this decision are: implementation costs, impact on your technology ecosystem, and internal resources available for managing the migration. This blog walks you through the build vs. buy decision criteria to help you make the right choice for your organization.
What It Takes to Build ISO 20022 Compliance In-House
ISO 20022 compliance requires a comprehensive overhaul of an organization’s entire payment infrastructure. Managing this transition in-house will inevitably be a bigger lift than outsourcing it to a trusted partner.
Internally, ISO 20022 compliance requires close collaboration between IT, Treasury, Finance, and Compliance teams. Technical teams must map the organization’s existing payment data — which may be scattered across various sources — into ISO 20022’s structured format and strict field requirements. These teams will also handle data quality remediation, manage bank connectivity and integration, and test new systems with each banking partner. Additionally, all TMS and ERP systems must be manually upgraded, including the middleware that connects them. This is a significant undertaking that can divert IT resources from product updates and tech debt reduction.
Meanwhile, Treasury teams must continue to manage daily payments with existing systems while also reviewing data mappings, testing new interfaces, validating outputs, and ultimately learning entirely new workflows and systems. Finance teams likewise need more time to verify correct payment formatting and troubleshoot failed transactions.
This dual focus splits teams’ time and attention, potentially creating a permanent state of disruption. For organizations with lean teams, this can disrupt operations and result in lengthy implementation timelines.
When Does Going In-House Make Sense?
Building in-house makes sense in some scenarios. Since this change significantly impacts middleware, businesses with low connectivity complexity face a lighter lift than those using hundreds of systems across different business units. Here are some scenarios when building in -house makes sense:
- Low Bank Complexity
For organizations that work with two or three banks, integration is typically manageable for an internal team. Each bank connection requires specific testing, certification, and ongoing maintenance of file formats and connectivity protocols. With a handful of bank relations, it’s feasible to handle the technical specifications and documentation. With fewer moving parts, the ongoing maintenance burden remains reasonable rather than becoming a full-time job. The cost may even be more justifiable than the cost of an enterprise vendor solution.
- A Single ERP or TMS
A unified ERP or TMS simplifies the technical architecture of ISO 20022 migration. Data mapping is also more straightforward with a single data model and schema, as it’s clear where payment lives, how it’s structured, and what transformations are needed for compliant messages. Organizations with less connectivity won’t have to maintain multiple integration points that require different levels of expertise and can control and test changes more easily. - Strong Internal Expertise
ISO 20022 migration requires substantial internal expertise. Internal technical teams with deep knowledge of payment systems, bank protocols, XML message standards, and ISO 20022 specifications benefit from shorter learning curves and faster development cycles. Strong internal expertise also enables organizations to maintain and evolve the solution over time without depending on vendor cycles.
When Does a Vendor Solution Make Sense?
Vendor solutions are most appropriate when you have a complex set up with multiple ERP and treasury management systems, and/or lack a dedicated cross-functional team with technical expertise.
Complex setups are ideal for a solution like TIS. TIS collaborated with The Adecco Group, a global leader in tech and talent solutions operating in more than 60 countries — across 35 banks and 1,400+ bank accounts — to streamline its ISO 20022 migration. TIS functioned as a transformation engine that translated Adecco’s legacy format payment files and unstructured postal addresses into bank-appropriate formats. It acts as a conversion layer, eliminating the need for companies to modify their source systems.
TIS has a massive library of payment profiles, making it easy to adapt to each bank’s standards and system requirements.
Capturing the full cost of building ISO readiness
Building in-house is the best option if future-proof compliance is the goal — no matter how long it takes. However, from a cost perspective, it’s not necessarily the most feasible solution. Larger organizations that have complex back- or middle-office systems and depend on many vendors will face higher costs.
Research shows that in 2023, European banks had already spent $100 billion in preparing for the new ISO standard. While direct costs for corporate organizations may not reach these levels, this figure illustrates how expensive migration can be. For larger organizations conducting international business and relying on multiple systems and vendors for day-to-day operations, the cost of build time, infrastructure and testing environments, and upgrading source materials as well as integrations can be significant.
And those are only direct costs. Building an in-house solution for complex organizations becomes even more expensive when factoring in the potential operational disruption, ongoing change management to train teams on new systems and workflows, and the costs of ongoing maintenance and upgrades. Costs escalate further when teams rely on banks and their changing implementation timelines, tying up resources in ongoing adjustments rather than one-time implementation.
The Case for TIS
TIS excels at helping organizations manage complex global payments. Our platform is a central repository for all treasury and payment information, automatically translating legacy formats and unstructured data into compliant standards before sharing them with banks. This third-party integration not only helps your organization remain compliant, but it also eliminates the configuration burdens on in-house teams and removes payment delays.
For complex, global businesses, TIS offers lower costs, improved scalability, and faster implementation times.
Lower Cost
Since you don’t need to update your back-office systems, managing information through a single source of truth is more cost effective. If managed internally, format development and testing is likely to take additional internal IT resources of a few days, leading to extra cost. Without a single solution like TIS, organizations must manage varying formats and back‑end requirements across multiple systems—tasks that demand specialized expertise and can take days for non‑specialists to complete. The real cost layers emerge in back‑office effort, format development, one‑off implementations, and even maintenance, all of which multiply when different ERPs require separate handling. By providing a unified source that delivers the exact format each back‑end system needs, TIS eliminates the need to build and maintain formats independently, thereby contributing to clear total cost of ownership.
Faster Implementation Times
With a centralized operations team specializing in ISO 20022 standards, TIS delivers faster development cycles than in-house migration. By managing only one system (TIS), teams can deploy changes and updates quickly without disrupting core systems.
Better Scalability
With TIS, organizations benefit from a platform that develops and maintains formats for numerous customers across industries and geographic regions. Instead of creating and maintaining formats independently for each system or infrastructure, companies can rely on TIS’s continuously expanding library of proven formats. This shared expertise enables seamless scalability in case of business expansion and growth (e.g.; M&A, new systems integration, regulatory changes) without additional development effort.
Maintenance
The ISO format requires formal maintenance every few years, creating an ongoing cycle of updates and associated administrative costs that organizations must manage on their own. This continual upkeep can become a significant operational burden, as companies are responsible for resourcing the maintenance work, and absorbing the related expenses. In contrast, when organizations adopt TIS, these updates are handled automatically as part of the TIS offering, eliminating the need for internal oversight and reducing the long‑term maintenance costs and effort typically linked to regulatory changes. What this also achieves is establish a stable ownership of the project over time.
Next Steps in Your ISO 20022 Journey
By carefully evaluating your bank complexity, system architecture, internal capabilities, and long-term scalability needs, you can make an informed decision about building vs. buying an ISO 20022 compliance solution that positions your organization for success in the evolving payments landscape.
Still evaluating whether to build or buy? See for yourself how TIS can eliminate the complexity, cost, and resource drain of in-house development. Book a demo today.
