The ISO 20022 payment standards have been in preparation by the Bank of England for years, and the expected timelines for mandatory implementation tend to shift based on dynamic feedback from regulators and banks regarding their readiness.
As of February 2025, the 2025 deadlines are reasonably set – with mandatory changes hitting in May and November.
Will ISO 20022 changes impact you in May 2025?
Only certain types of organisations and certain types of payments will be impacted by ISO 20022 in May 2025. Those are:
- Financial institutions must add the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and Purpose of Payment (PoP) Code to any payment instructed via CHAPS.
- All other organisations must add the Purpose of Payment Code to all CHAPS payments related to property.
ISO 20022 changes coming in November:
- From November onwards, any CHAPS payment will require a Structured Address to be added.
By November 2025, ISO 20022 will impact every organisation processing CHAPS payments, making it a necessity to understand the changes required, engage with back-office software providers and banks, and allocate the necessary resources for a smooth and timely transition to compliance.
>> If you’re impacted, this 10-step action plan provides a helpful starting point for how to engage with your banks and back-office systems.
Bank Statements: The end of the MT format
Bank statements are easy to overlook when discussing ISO 20022 – after all, the primary focus is ensuring payments are successfully processed.
But ISO 20022 will fundamentally change the bank statement format, too. All those additional data points you are now required to add into your payment instructions (LEI, PoP, etc.) will also be reported back to you by the bank.
From November 2025, SWIFT will start to deprecate the MT statement format, moving to a much richer format called CAMT, an ISO 20022 statement format. Over the next 2 years, MT format bank statements will yield to data-rich CAMT files – an exciting prospect for treasurers looking to get more strategic value (read: deeper insights) out of their reconciliation and cash positioning processes.
If you currently receive your bank statements through SWIFT in an MT format, now is the time to review what changes might be required from your finance infrastructure and 3rd party software providers like your ERP. Are back-office systems ready to receive and read correctly these new formats? Where will this additional data be stored?
Core treasury processes like reconciliation and cash forecasting will be impacted – but beyond just additional admin, the new data-rich formats will provide an opportunity for deeper insights into organisations’ cash reserves and more.
Looking beyond 2025: ISO 20022 as the new standard for all payment rails
The Bank of England has made it very clear that adding the LEI, PoP, and Structured Address will become mandatory over the next couple of years across all payment types.
So, while you may not be impacted right now, there is undeniable value in understanding the changes that are coming. How will they impact your payments infrastructure? Which of your 3rd party tools and banks will require changes to their data input/output/storage? And what internal resources will be required from you to manage such a large financial transformation project?
If you want to learn more, visit our ISO 20022 resource hub and subscribe to our newsletter which will keep you informed of timeline changes and mandatory migration requirements as we navigate ISO 20022, together.
