SWIFT announced initiation of the development phase with EBA Clearing to migrate the large-value payment system EURO1 to the ISO 20022 standard. The two organizations will work toward a November 2021 completion date to correspond with the deadline for the ISO 20022 migration of the Eurosystem’s TARGET2 platform.
EURO1 processes on average 200,000 payments per day with an average total value of over €200 billion. The system currently counts 45 participant banks and reaches nearly 20,000 BICs in and beyond Europe. The goal of the development phase is to align specifications and milestones to minimize effort by market participants during the transition and ensure seamless intra-day switching between both euro payment systems.
ISO 20022 creates a new language and structure for payments information, enabling the exchange of more and higher quality data that in turn improves efficiency, compliance and client experiences. Payment systems of all reserve currencies are moving to the standard, and SWIFT has put in place a robust programme to facilitate community-wide adoption.
The ISO 20022 migration is part of a larger future positioning program that the two organizations announced last year after a comprehensive consultation with EURO1 users. The project seeks to evolve EURO1 in line with user expectations while maintaining benefits such as liquidity efficiency, immediate payment finality, cost-effectiveness and added resilience for high-value payments. The first deliverables, including a dashboard to enhance liquidity monitoring capabilities of EURO1 users, will be implemented before the end of 2019.