Fintech & Digital Assets
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Fintech & Digital Assets
ISO 20022 and the remittance counter: what exchange houses need to change
Cross-border payment messages have moved to ISO 20022. The richer data only helps if it is captured correctly at the counter and in the app.
For years, a cross-border transfer travelled as a compact MT103 message with a few lines of free text for names and addresses. Banks on the Swift network have now moved cross-border payments to ISO 20022, where every piece of information has its own field. The coexistence period for payment messages ended in November 2025, and the next step is already scheduled: fully unstructured postal addresses are due to stop being accepted from November 2026.
Why it matters to an exchange house
Most exchange houses do not connect to Swift directly; they send payments through a sponsor bank. But the sponsor bank can only send what it receives. If the remittance system captures the beneficiary's address as one line of text, the bank has to reject the payment, repair it by hand or send it in a format that will soon be refused.
Structured data at the source
The change starts at the counter and in the mobile app:
- capture town and country as separate, validated fields for every sender and beneficiary;
- record a purpose of payment from a defined list rather than free text;
- keep identification documents and their numbers in their own fields;
- store names exactly as they appear on the document, in Latin script where the corridor requires it.
Better data, fewer false alerts
Structured data is also a compliance gain. Sanctions screening on clean, separate fields produces fewer false matches than screening a single block of text, and transaction monitoring can use purpose codes and country fields to spot unusual patterns. The data that a correspondent bank sees is the same data your own compliance team can analyse.
A practical sequence
- map your current message to the ISO 20022 fields your sponsor bank requires;
- change forms and validation in branches and apps first;
- clean the existing customer and beneficiary records that will be reused;
- test end to end with the sponsor bank on each corridor before the deadlines.
Our fintech team builds remittance platforms with ISO 20022 data at their core and connects them to correspondent banks, screening and reporting.
