In a confidential letter sent to the participants of EURO1 large value payments and the STEP1 platform Wednesday, EBA Clearing announced delays to testing and live implementation dates.
The letter obtained by Finextra explains: “The test planning and live implementation date for the ISO migration will be aligned with the new timings for T2 as recently informed by the ECB”.
It states that connectivity testing will start in September 2021, lasting until November 2021 and that user testing will start in December 2021, to be finalised in September 2022.
The live date will be 21 November 2022. This is a 12-month delay from the November 2021 date announced last year.
After industry-wide calls for an extension, the ECB confirmed that it would push out the T2-T2S consolidation from November 2021 until November 2022. The ECB cited a combination of the Covid-19 disruptions as well as the rescheduling of Swift’s global migration of cross-border payments to ISO 20022 as key reasons for the delay.
The note concludes that further information and details regarding scheduling and milestones will be published once T2 planning is available in early 2021.
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