“ISO 20022 is the hardest topic in payments today.”
Update, 16 October 2026. Swift deferred the November 2026 structured address deadline on 27 August 2026, and no replacement date has been confirmed. The reference to it below is left as written because this is a dated post. See No Swift deadline. Same problems. for the current position.
That should worry people.
At Nacha Smarter Faster Payments 2026, leaders from Bank of America, the Federal Reserve Financial Services and Swift essentially said:
👉 The migration worked
👉 The value hasn’t
Let that sink in.
- ~97% of payments now use ISO 20022
- Millions of messages flowing daily
- Years of investment across the industry
And still:
- ROI is unclear
- Data quality is “not there yet”
- Processes remain unchanged
So what actually happened?
We rebuilt the entire payments language, just to keep speaking the same way.
Most banks didn’t transform. They translated. They patched. They moved faster spaghetti.
And now the industry is sitting on the richest payment dataset it has ever had, without knowing how to use it operationally.
The real shift hasn’t started yet
It’s not about sending payments anymore. It’s about:
- Why payments fail after they were “accepted”
- Why reconciliation still breaks
- Why investigations still take 30 minutes
ISO 20022 didn’t solve these problems. It exposed them.
With the structured and hybrid address requirement approaching, this becomes very real: better data will not reduce complexity if you don’t change how you operate on it.
Source: BofA US wire product head: ‘ISO 20022 is the hardest topic in payments today’, Finextra, featuring Jenny Lee, Frank Van Driessche and Tony Clark.