Swift is to push the gospel of global interoperability for the ISO 20022 messaging standard to the very top of the payments food chain with the formation of a High Value Payment taskforce comprised of global banks and major market infrastructure providers.
With most domestic payments networks re-engineering their platforms for a new era of real-time payments, the creation of the new taskforce is seen as a key component of Swift’s ISO 20022 harmonisation initiative that aims to address the industry concern around fragmentation and the risk of multiple versions and flavours being adopted across various markets.
The new task force, called HVPS+, will build on the existing HVPS market practice documented in the interbank co-operative's MyStandards messaging toolbox that focuses on ensuring interoperability with FIN messages in the cross-border space.
The new group, which goes beyond current market practice, will deliver an additional set of ISO 20022 guidelines for high value payments systems to include more structured, accurate and richer end-to-end data.
‘From an industry perspective, this is a meaningful collaborative initiative that can benefit all market infrastructures and their members,” says Gina Russo, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “By encouraging a standardised global approach to ISO 20022 implementation for high value payments systems, the industry as a whole can be in a position to reduce costs, ensure efficient implementation, and realise the true benefits of using a common global standard”.
The US Clearing House, like the Fed and many other market infrastructure providers around the world, is adopting ISO 20022 as its preferred messaging standard for real-time and high-value payments
Bob Pepitone, Chips product manager at The Clearing House, says “As we prepare our implementation strategy to convert our proprietary Chips format specifications to ISO 20022, we would like to use this new global market practice as a baseline. This will allow our members to use the same formats and processes with TCH and other HVP communities, while incorporating the unique characteristics of the Chips messaging formats. This approach will definitely help to enable interoperability for all payments market infrastructures globally.”
Other organisations participating in the HVPS+ taskforce include: ABN Amro, Australian Payments Clearing Association, Banca d’Italia, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bank of England, EBA Clearing, European Central Bank, FirstRand Bank Ltd, Hong Kong Interbank Clearing Limited, Payments Canada, Société Générale, Standard Bank, and Wells Fargo.
Swift says the taskforce started work at the end of June 2016 and expects to publish a first set of additional market practice guidelines in MyStandards in Q4 2016/Q1 2017.