The challenges of SWIFT MT and ISO 20022

Trace Financial is a leading provider of financial message transformation, integration and corporate action management solutions.

Trace Financial’s latest SWIFT MT whitepaper, based on the challenges surrounding the coexistence with ISO 20022, outlines how businesses and organisations can overcome the complex mapping challenges that can arise in the process.

“The whitepaper itself is something we produced around the conversations we’ve had with our customers and clients around the coexistence of SWIFT MT messages and the ISO 20022 format,” says Paul Ruskin, Director of Business Development at Trace Financial.

“There are several challenges, and we understand that everyone’s requirements are different in this area, but we know that the pain points are very similar, so we created a whitepaper to explain these points. It would be useful to the industry as a whole.”

Around 10 years ago, SWIFT developed a set of formal specifications that describe how to convert MT messages into their ISO 20022 equivalents. As these have not been updated for several years, MT standards have developed and the current standards are out of date.

The whitepaper answers questions that organisations may have difficulty addressing, such as how to onboard new clients who use the ISO 20022 as their standard, and how to protect legacy systems that only consume the SWIFT MT which must be interfaced with an ISO 20022 system or service.

It further explains the history of MT and MX and the maintainability issues and specific business needs.

Other points of focus include:

  • Connecting to the growing list of new payment services that require ISO 20022 in both XML and JSON
  • Onboarding new clients who use ISO 20022 as their standard
  • Protecting legacy systems
  • Differences between MT<> MX specifications
  • What to do if no specifications exist for the current business requirement
  • Why some SWIFT MT messages can’t be mapped to/from ISO 20022

To learn more about the SWIFT MT whitepaper, download your complimentary whitepaper here.

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