ISO 20022 is a global, open communication standard for financial institutions established by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), an independent, non-governmental standardization body. It is a language based on a business dictionary, which harmonizes multiple scattered standards.

ISO 20022:

• includes a lot of highly structured data, which is substantially beneficial to all market participants;
• enhances data sets by promoting a comprehensive automation throughout the entire lifecycle of a transaction;
• improves abilities of automatic readout, thus enabling faster processing and greater compatibility between different countries and clearing systems.

Both banks and their clients have to upgrade their systems to comply with the new requirements.

What is the ISO 20022 system migration timeline according to SWIFT?

According to the SWIFT guidelines, banks are obliged to receive payment messages in a format compliant with ISO 20022 (MX format) since 2023. Soon, the formats for further types of payments will also change.

Starting from November 2025, key payment messages (MT1XX, MT2XX) should be sent between banks as MX messages only.

SORBNET (RTGS) payments are executed via SWIFT, therefore this type of payments will also be migrated to the MX format in June 2025. Until then, if the bank receives a SORBNET payment order in the MX format, the bank will send it in the MTXXX format.

The format of Elixir (ACH) payments remains unchanged for the time being.

Timeline of changes:

MT messages to migrate to MX

The new format will be applicable to MT1XX, MT2XX, and MT9XX messages (both for payment messages and bank statements).

Which messages will be changed?

Citi Handlowy continues to send MT payment messages and information messages (MT900/910/940/942/950) via SWIFTNet FIN, which will be supported up until November 2025.

Since the new messaging format MX includes additional fields that were absent in the MT format, bank statements can be expected to include more information.

We recommend that you replace statements in the MT940/942 format with the formats CAMT.052 and CAMT.053 as soon as possible, as these formats incorporate a wider scope of data provided by a counterparty.

Reduced scope of information in MT messages

The new MX messaging format enables sending a greater number of fields and characters than the MT format, which could lead to some difficulties when converting data in the transition period.

If the bank receives a message in the MX format, the bank will continue to send MT messages, which might cause some of the provided information/data for SORBNET (until June 2025) and Elixir payments to be omitted.