ISO 20022 Event Recap

On Thursday, 27 June, ATEB hosted an interesting session at Swift HQ on how ISO 20022 is future-proof and can bring value to corporate treasury.

We had an expert panel with Michael Aandahl from Ingka group, Damien Godderis from BNP Paribas, and Luc Belpaire from FIS, with moderation by Swift’s Brice Goemans.

The session started with recapping on ISO 20022 concepts and explaining current timelines of the financial industry moving towards adoption and how it would impact corporate treasurers.

We focused the discussion on benefits and innovation opportunities, especially if the full payments chain from debtor, through banks and market infrastructures, to the creditor all happens in ISO 20022 – where the relevant data gets provided at the source and is preserved end-to-end.

From a corporate perspective the panel highlighted automation opportunities with attempts to minimize unhappy flows that require manual interventions. Being able to get better quality data in a structured way within payments and reporting related exchanges will make both corporate and bank processing more efficient and allows for actionable insights such as bank fees or transaction tracking when dealing with high volumes of payments, ultimately leading to payments becoming faster.

The journey towards using ISO 20022 requires effort and understanding on pragmatically finding the best use cases to focus on and integrating the capabilities at the data source.

Michael’s advice to get started was to begin small and scale up, alongside gaining experience with the new format and channels. Damien’s advice was to not approach such projects in isolation, but to talk to partners such as peer-treasurers, banking partners, ERP/TMS providers etc. to discover the payment processing improvements it will bring, as well as the better services it will enable. Luc’s advice was to move at your own pace and leverage tools available to get started with the first steps towards using and integrating ISO 20022.

Brice concluded with explaining what Swift is doing to help banks deliver value to their corporate customers through introducing ISO 20022 standards and network capabilities for treasury payments, as well as easy access to Swift ready-made services.