2025 is a critical year for one of the most significant transformations within the financial landscape: the migration to ISO 20022, the new universal messaging standard for payments. It is estimated that by the end of this year, 80% of high-value payments will be ISO 20022-based, with Swift phasing out legacy MT messages. This shift represents more than a simple messaging update; it’s an opportunity for treasurers to enhance automation, compliance, and efficiency in their cash and payments operations.
Why ISO 20022 Matters for Treasurers
ISO 20022 brings a richer data structure, enabling faster, more transparent, and more structured, compliant payments processing. This reduces errors, enhances reconciliation, and strengthens compliance with regulatory requirements. For corporate treasurers, this is an opportunity for:
- Enhanced reconciliation & automation: Enriched data structures reduce manual intervention in matching transactions, accelerating reconciliation processes.
- Regulatory compliance: Structured data fields improve transparency, reducing false positives in fraud detection and AML compliance.
- Simplified multi-bank connectivity: A standardized messaging format across banks streamlines integration, reducing complexity in multi-banking environments.
However, as the migration to ISO 20022 progresses and MT legacy formats continue to coexist alongside the newer XML standards, several challenges arise. On the corporate side, many systems are not yet equipped to process the new formats or to provide the richer information required. This misalignment could lead to business disruptions due to issues in payment execution, reconciliation challenges, and process gaps that require manual intervention. As a result, businesses face an increased operational risk. Additionally, they are not able to fully leverage the benefits that ISO 20022 offers. Therefore, corporate finance professionals must take proactive steps to ensure that their businesses are prepared for the changes ahead.
One important question you might need to ask yourself is: Are your back-end systems ready to fully digest the new ISO 20022 messages and to migrate all relevant formats globally to bank- and country-specific ISO XML?
Actionable Steps for Treasurers
To ensure a seamless transition, treasurers and other financial professionals should proactively assess their payment processes and banking relationships:
- Engage with partner banks: Understand their readiness and timelines for supporting ISO 20022 in corporate-to-bank transactions.
- Evaluate payment formats: Identify whether legacy MT messages (e.g., MT101, MT103) are in use and plan for migration to XML-based messages.
- Review master data & address formatting: From November 2026, unstructured address data will no longer be accepted in interbank transactions.
- Assess statement reporting impact: The shift from MT940 to CAMT.053 bank statements requires reviewing bank connectivity and reconciliation processes.
- Ensure system readiness: Collaborate with ERP, TMS, and payment service providers to confirm compatibility and upgrade where necessary.
How TIS Supports ISO 20022 Migration
TIS stands on the forefront of ISO 20022 readiness for global payments execution. This includes the capability to read legacy payment formats and transform them into ISO XML, ensuring that clients can maintain their smooth and automated end-to-end payment operations, even if their back-office systems are not yet able to adhere to ISO 20022 standards. TIS has the capability to enrich the address data sets with the master data stored in TIS and transform the unstructured into structured data sets as per the ISO 20022 standard.
On the bank-to-business side, TIS is able to split accumulated bank files, which makes the data easier to distribute and consume for the different back office systems, and avoids unnecessary data duplication and large file sizes. TIS can also gather and merge individual bank files to complete bank statement files, if a bank has not yet fully transitioned to ISO 20022 standards, but the corporate’s back-office systems are ready. TIS clients receive complete account statement files without the need to build or develop their own solutions.
Additionally, TIS unifies the data sent from the different banks. Clients don’t need to worry about the different versions (camt.053v.02, v.03, etc) and the different data structures. Translation from any camt.053 version is possible – with the additional ability, to transform bank-country-specific versions to a unified MT940 version, as a solution for businesses whose back-office systems are not ISO 20022 ready yet.
Conclusion: ISO 20022 A Strategic Opportunity
Now is the time to engage with banking partners, review internal systems, and embrace the benefits of this transformative change.
The capabilities described above, coupled with the fact that TIS already integrated hundreds of back-office systems, supports thousands of different payment types, maintains over 140,000 unique payment profiles, and invests in ongoing development and maintenance of these and new formats to ensure future-proofing, make TIS the ideal vendor for corporations with global payment operations and a complex back-office systems landscape when transitioning to ISO 20022.
