ISO 20022
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The first UK changes took effect on 1 May 2025. Since then, Purpose of Payment codes have been required on CHAPS payments related to property, and LEIs on CHAPS payments between financial institutions. The removal of unstructured addresses from CHAPS, planned for November 2026, has been deferred. The Bank of England expects November 2027, subject to confirmation. BACS and Faster Payments deadlines are still to be confirmed.

This depends on your bank and technology providers. A thorough review of your current financial infrastructure and processes is advised.

You may need to update payment file formats to align with ISO 20022 standards such as pain.001. It is also crucial to ensure that the new standards are compatible with your existing ERP and TMS systems to ensure that your financial operations are uninterrupted by the change.

Equally important is engaging your banks to assess their readiness and requirements for ISO 20022, it will differ from bank to bank. ISO 20022 will require careful data mapping, robust validation, and increased security and data storage consideration.

View our 10-step action plan.

SWIFT MT messages were first introduced in the 1970s and were designed to carry minimal datasets for ease of processing, with bandwidth and storage being high-priced commodities.

Decades later and the demand has evolved to better suit the technology and data-first age we’re living in. ISO 20022 standards are XML-based and can support richer and more structured data, for better machine-readability, automation, compliance, and cross-border payment insights.

• The Bank of England has published the enhanced ISO 20022 message schemas for CHAPS on MyStandards, along with further technical guidance. All CHAPS Direct Participants are expected to use the MyStandards Readiness Portal, and indirect participants and software vendors can also access it via a Direct Participant. While these resources are primarily aimed at participants, they provide insight into the required formats.
• We have also created an ISO 20022 Resource Hub which aims to help businesses understand and implement the changes.
• Additionally, the Bank of England and SWIFT websites provide extensive information on standards and implementation resources.

Failing to migrate to ISO 20022 on time exposes your organisation to significant risks.

Payment rejections and processing failures become increasingly likely as banks phase out legacy formats, causing operational disruptions and financial losses. You’ll also miss out on the benefits of enriched data, such as automated reconciliation and improved payment transparency, hindering efficiency.

Moreover, delayed migration reduces compatibility with global banks and regulatory reporting tools, potentially limiting international transactions and increasing compliance risks.

Prioritising a timely transition is essential to avoid these pitfalls and maintain competitiveness in today’s financial industry.

A PoP code is a structured piece of data that provides detailed information about the reason for a payment.

It provides a way to categorise and describe the nature of a transaction, rather than relying on ambiguous free-form text descriptions.

PoP codes enable automated processing and reconciliation of payments as systems can easily and accurately identify the purpose of a payment.

They also aid in making payments more compliant, especially as Anti-Money Laundering (AML) procedures and Sanctions Screening rely on accurate payment purpose information.

Whilst ISO 20022 introduces a standard ISO 20022 purpose code list (which is very granular and includes hundreds of codes), each country and payment scheme has modified it and created shortened versions for use in their market or scheme.

CHAPS users must refer to the UK purpose code list, which has been developed by The Bank of England and Pay.UK.

If you would like to know which payment codes you will need to include in your payment files for your specific payment rails and geographies, we’ll be happy to go through them with you. Contact us now.

A LEI is a 20-character, alpha-numeric code based on the ISO 17442 standard. It uniquely identifies legally distinct entities that engage in financial transactions globally.

Inclusion of LEIs into the ISO 20022 standard with provide clear and unambiguous identification of the parties involved in a transaction.

It enables better risk management by providing a clear way to identify counterparties which is essential for Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know-Your-Customer (KYC), and Sanctions checks.

The global standardisation of ISO 20022 also facilitates the accuracy and automation across both domestic and international financial transactions.

While the use of LEIs for non-financial organisations is not yet mandated in the UK, organisations are advised to find out more about LEIs and consider obtaining one, as well as collecting this information from counterparties.

The Bank of England has mandated the use of LEIs for all CHAPS payments between financial institutions from 1 May 2025.

The BoE has also stated its vision to widen its requirement to all participants over time and will provide 18 months’ notice if this requirement is to be introduced. Additionally, organisations operating internationally may need to provide an LEI for payment schemes in other jurisdictions.

Structured Remittance refers to the standard, organised way that payment-related information is included within payment messages.

Instead of relying on free-form text, which can be difficult for systems to interpret, ISO 20022 uses defined data elements and formats. This structured approach is more compatible for machine-readability and allows for automated processing and reconciliation.

It also reduces the risk of payment disputes or discrepancies as there is no room for misinterpretation.

Structured Remittance within ISO 20022 transforms remittance information from a potential bottleneck into a valuable source of automated, accurate, and actionable data.

Currently, address information in payment messages is often communicated using unstructured free-text fields, leading to inconsistencies, processing difficulties, and hindering international interoperability.

In contrast, a Structured Address, as promoted by the ISO 20022 standard, breaks down address details into distinct, standardised fields, enabling more efficient automated processing, improved data quality, and seamless cross-border transactions, ultimately reducing errors and costs.

ISO 20022 is moving payment schemes towards mandatory structured or hybrid address formats. Swift, the Bank of England and the European Payments Council have all deferred the November 2026 deadline, and the Bank of England expects November 2027 for CHAPS, subject to confirmation.

AccessPay provides a service to facilitate corporate ISO 20022 migration, acting as an intermediary. We have helped organisations overcome common challenges in adding new data fields like LEIs to their payment instructions, managing data storage, and integrating PoP code lists.

Our Payee Management solution works with any payment type for any UK bank, helping organisations reap the benefits of ISO 20022 without a custom ERP upgrade.

We have also worked with financial institutions, enabling them to enrich payment files with mandatory Purpose of Payment codes and Legal Entity Identifiers, saving the bank from significant changes to their back-office systems. View our video series to find out more.

Yes, with AccessPay! We can take your CSV files and convert them into ISO 20022-compliant messages.

AccessPay simplifies ISO 20022 file format transformations through intelligent data-mapping, accurately converting legacy formats such as MT message formats into standardised ISO 20022 XML.

Rigorous validation also ensures message structure integrity and minimises payment failures. Crucially, our platform accommodates bank-specific requirements across a variety of geographies, maintaining an up-to-date library of bank variances.

This mitigates the burden of nuanced bank implementations from users, enabling seamless global connectivity. We handle the complexities so you can have accurate and compliant payment messages for a smooth transition to ISO 20022.

Handling bank statements within the ISO 20022 framework is made easier with AccessPay. Our platform transforms your statements, ensuring they work smoothly with various back-office systems.

We automate the daily collection of statements, saving time and effort and (before this data reaches your systems) can add extra information and check for accuracy.

For compliance and auditability, we keep a detailed log of all statement files. Within the context of ISO 20022, AccessPay helps businesses adapt as older formats are replaced, managing these changes behind the scenes. Consider a treasury team using Oracle or SAP; AccessPay enables them to collect daily camt.053 statements from different banks, convert them into a usable format, and reconcile their accounts efficiently, all without needing custom programming.