Conversation with Alexandre Boissiere | Head of Business Application Support CBH Compagnie Bancaire Helvétique
While the November 2025 milestone marked the formal cutover for Swift MT103 and MT202 payment messages for cross-border payments, the ISO 20022 journey is far from over. Many institutions treated November 2025 as the finish line. In reality, it was only the first major checkpoint. That deadline focused on format cutover for key cross‑border payment instructions, but additional phases in November 2026, November 2027 and beyond 2028 will drive deeper adoption, richer data usage and further decommissioning of legacy standards. Banks that pause after 2025 risk being permanently in catch‑up mode. Governance, funding and accountability need to extend beyond the initial November 2025 cutover to cover optimisation and innovation phases as the market and infrastructures continue to evolve.
ISO 20022 is often described as a new messaging standard, but for banks and financial institutions it is far more than a technical upgrade. It is a fundamental shift in how payments and client data flow through the financial system, with direct implications for cost, risk, and customer experience. Even after deadlines pass, institutions can still send legacy MT messages via SWIFT’s automatic translation service into ISO 20022 MX format. However, this convenience comes at a cost, it’s a chargeable service, and more critically, the translation process often strips away some of ISO 20022’s structured data advantages, such as granular fields for parties, purposes, and remittance details, potentially undermining the very benefits institutions are migrating to achieve.
For a private bank, ISO 20022 was first and foremost an industry-wide transition that we needed to embrace in order to remain fully connected to the global payments ecosystem. While the migration required significant investment and effort, it also establishes a more robust foundation for payment processing and future market developments.
Alexandre Boissiere
From messaging upgrade to data transformation
Across the industry, ISO 20022 is rapidly extending beyond cross‑border payments into domestic RTGS systems, steadily becoming the default language for high‑value flows. At the same time, regulators and market infrastructures are increasing the pressure to adopt, while corporate and wealth clients are raising expectations around transparency, speed and quality of information. In this context, ISO 20022 should be seen not as a one‑off format change, but as a fundamental data transformation that reshapes how payment information is captured, shared and leveraged across the institution.
The real value of ISO 20022 is not the message format itself, but the quality and consistency of the information that accompanies a payment. Better structured data supports more efficient processing, stronger controls and improved transparency throughout the payment lifecycle. A.B
ISO 20022 in plain business language
ISO 20022 introduces a single, common language that replaces today’s fragmented, often unstructured legacy formats and the complex mappings between them. It brings richer, more granular data elements, from names and addresses to identifiers and detailed remittance information, that travel consistently end‑to‑end. For technology teams, it offers a shared data model and structured, API‑friendly formats that integrate more cleanly with core banking platforms, compliance systems, and modern integration layers.
What it means day‑to‑day – from the front to the back office
For the C‑suite: Cost, Risk, and Growth
Higher straight-through processing (STP) rates and fewer payment repairs will directly lower cost-per-payment and reduce incident volumes across operations. Richer, structured data from ISO 20022 will also strengthen financial crime controls – through better screening accuracy and fewer false positives – while improving the quality and automation of regulatory reporting. Beyond cost savings and risk reduction, this data foundation enables new revenue streams, such as insight-driven client reporting, cash-flow advisory services, and premium value-added offerings tailored to corporate and wealth clients.
For Private Banking and front‑office teams
Our clients rarely ask about payment standards. What matters to them is that payments are executed reliably and that information is available when questions arise. The richer data provided by ISO 20022 improves traceability and helps resolve enquiries more efficiently, particularly for complex cross-border transactions. A.B
For private banking and front-office teams, ISO 20022 delivers richer narratives and structured references on client statements, making complex flows like family office distributions, trust payments, and cross-border transfers far easier to explain and track. Fewer payment delays and investigations translate to smoother, more reliable experiences for HNW and UHNW clients who demand seamless service. This also enables enhanced, consolidated reporting capabilities across multiple jurisdictions and currencies, strengthening client relationships through greater transparency and custom insights.
For Operations: fewer exceptions, better control
On the operations floor, ISO 20022 drives higher straight-through processing (STP) rates, significantly reducing manual interventions, payment errors, and the resulting rework. More complete, structured data enables sharper root-cause analysis for exceptions and unlocks ongoing process optimisation across payment types and volumes. Enhanced end-to-end transparency along the payment chain also simplifies investigations and client query resolution, freeing teams from repetitive firefighting to focus on proactive improvements.
From an operational perspective, more complete and structured payment information reduces ambiguity and facilitates investigations. While the benefits will materialise progressively, the ability to identify, analyse and resolve payment exceptions more efficiently is already becoming an important advantage. A.B
For Compliance and Risk: smarter financial crime controls
Financial crime and sanctions teams will benefit from ISO 20022’s distinct, well-defined data elements, which improve screening accuracy through better name matching, address verification, and purpose identification, providing visibility across the full transaction chain for more effective monitoring and investigations. Additionally, standardised fields support more automated and complete regulatory reporting, minimising manual effort and errors in compliance submissions.
ISO 20022 does not replace sound compliance processes, but it provides higher quality data to support them. More structured information helps strengthen screening, investigations and regulatory reporting, while reducing reliance on manual interpretation. A.B
For Technology and Architecture: Building the Right Foundation
For technology and architecture leaders, ISO 20022 requires payment engines, channels, and screening tools that natively process its messages, moving beyond brittle legacy mappings. During coexistence periods, careful management of format translations is essential to mitigate data truncation risks and preserve the value of richer information flows. This also presents a strategic opportunity to evolve toward API-driven, event-based, and cloud-ready architectures, enabling the new payments data to be widely consumable across core banking, analytics, risk, and client-facing systems.
Governing the Transition – What Leadership Should Do Next
Aligning business, risk, and technology
Successful institutions are approaching ISO 20022 as a cross-functional change programme with strong C-level sponsorship and clear ownership spanning business, operations, risk, and IT functions. A bank-wide data model and governance framework ensure that richer ISO data is captured, stored, and consistently reused across the organisation rather than siloed in payments systems. Proactive communication and education for both clients and front-line staff will also be critical to reduce confusion, manage expectations, and minimise operational friction during the transition.
For institutions of our size, the success of this type of transformation depends heavily on the quality of the ecosystem around us. Close collaboration with our core banking provider ERI, our SWIFT connectivity partner Bottomline and our internal teams was essential to delivering the migration within the required timelines. A.B
From compliance to competitive edge
A roadmap for the next 12–24 months
Following the November 2025 migration milestone, the next phases of the ISO 20022 roadmap focus on extending the standard across operational workflows. By November 2026, financial institutions will need to support ISO 20022-based case management processes, including the ability to receive investigation and exception messages (such as camt.110), manage payment inquiries through ISO 20022 messaging, and process cancellation requests via Stop and Recall services. At the same time, many payment infrastructures will introduce requirements for structured address data within payment instructions, replacing traditional free-text fields. This evolution will require institutions to adapt their internal data models, customer onboarding processes, and compliance and AML systems to handle richer, structured payment data. By November 2027, the migration will extend to the full lifecycle of investigations and exceptions, with financial institutions required to send and receive investigation messages and process cancellations and recalls exclusively using ISO 20022 formats, marking the retirement of legacy MT messages for these workflows.
The transition to ISO 20022 may have been driven by industry requirements, but its long-term value lies in providing better payment transparency, stronger operational control and a sustainable foundation for future developments across the financial ecosystem. A.B
Looking ahead, ISO 20022 unlocks premium services like enhanced reconciliation, real-time payment tracking, and advanced analytics tailored for corporate treasuries and wealth clients seeking deeper visibility into complex flows. The richer data also fuels sharper internal insights to refine product design, dynamic pricing models, and proactive risk decisions across portfolios and client relationships. A pragmatic roadmap starts with mapping current data flows, prioritising high-value use cases like client reporting or fraud analytics, then iterating to capture compounding benefits as adoption matures.
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