J.P. Morgan’s Byrne on building an ISO 20022-native back office

With the November 2025 deadline for payment instructions drawing closer, J.P. Morgan Payments shared insights published by Swift on their ISO 20022 adoption journey, and lessons that may help the community.

J.P. Morgan was committed to being an early adopter of ISO 20022 and currently accounts for about 30% of the total ISO 20022 cross-border payment message traffic on the Swift network.

Going live in March 2023, Ciarán Byrne, head of Global Clearing Product and Transformation at J.P. Morgan Payments, explained the rationale: “There are several reasons why we went live with ISO 20022 with the adoption of CBPR+. Firstly, we felt it would reduce the risk of truncation during this period where MT and MX co-exist with one another. There were also technological benefits to being ready to receive which was mandatory and also send at the same time. And finally, as market leaders in clearing, we wanted to set the standard and be there to support our clients during their ISO 20022 migrations.”

Cross-border payments and reporting plus (CBPR+) is a workgroup of payments experts whose mission is to create global ISO 20022 Market Practice and Implementation Guidelines to ensure a common roll-out and implementation of ISO 20022 by banks.

While early adoption did bring minor teething issues, such as imperfections in straight-through processing (STP), these were quickly resolved. 

As more firms adopt ISO 20022, Byrne warned against a ‘lowest common denominator’ approach to compliance with the new standard, and recommended organizations instead build an ISO 20022-native back office.

“We’ve observed institutions that are taking the minimum compliance approach have experienced challenges when delivering against multiple migration deadlines,” said Byrne.  “Make sure to allocate enough time for testing and to focus on data quality, and training internal teams, particularly in operations and service, because this is essential to ensuring a smooth transition.”

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