ISO 20022 messages: In-flow translation service | ECS Fin

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Cushioning ISO 20022 messages with
in-flow translation service

Less than three months before ISO 20022 messages for cross-border payments and cash reporting (CBPR) to go live, it seems likely the target is finally still, and financial institutions across the globe are waiting with their arrows to shoot. As the go-live month draws nearer, what final preparations lie ahead?

ISO 20022 messages Overview

SWIFT aims to work towards an instant and frictionless payment landscape to serve the community’s ever-evolving needs, including today’s and emerging ones – particularly from the higher growth areas of the market.


The benefits of ISO 20022 are said to be:

  • Improved transparency and more remittance information.
  • Richer, better structured, and more granular data.
  • Fraud management, automation, improved analytics, and resilience.
  • Modern technological solutions to facilitate easy integration with legacy systems.
ISO 20022 messages Overview

A bump under the way for ISO 20022 messages adoption program

A bump under the way for ISO 20022 messages adoption program

From November 2022 onwards, SWIFT will enable ISO 20022 messages for cross-border payments, which will be live as per the associated CBPR+ usage guidelines. There will be approximately a three-year coexistence period for MT and MX (ISO 20022) message types. This period allows early adopters to benefit from MX’s richer and structured data while permitting laggards or other banks to adopt at their own pace.


Many banks might have several back-office systems that won’t migrate to the ISO 20022 program from the start of the adoption period owing to their legacy system’s inefficiencies. During the coexistence period, banks must ensure that these back-office systems can continue to transact the messages as normal, with counterparties adopting ISO 20022 messages.

Facilitating ISO 20022 adoption with new In-flow Translation service

In-flow translation is one of the vital keys to enabling interoperability between users of MX and MT, resulting in instant and frictionless domestic and cross-border payments. This service will aid banks that are not yet ready to process ISO 20022, ensuring the community has plenty of time to prepare for the new standard by translating the rich ISO 20022 messages, into the existing MT format. It also ensures that both message formats are delivered, so customers always have the complete data.
Facilitating ISO 20022 adoption with new In-flow Translation service

How does ECS Fin help?

With the mandatory introduction of ISO 20022 for payment messages across markets, ECS Fin helps those institutions that can’t handle ISO 20022 native data by the deadline. IMS safe-keeps all golden copies and translated messages so that they can be utilized later by interested parties and regulators.
* ISO 20022 users create a pacs.008 message and sends it through the Finplus channel.

* The message arrives centrally at the IMS solution, it is validated according to the validation rules for pacs.008 and those formulated by the CBPR+ Working Group. This ensures that the ISO 20022 message is configured and populated suitably for cross-border payments.

* Since the receiver is an MT user, once the validation is complete, the message will be translated into MT equivalent message type, which in this case is the MT103 message.

* IMS product will pack together the original and a translated message into a single, multi-format MX envelope, which is delivered to the MT user.

ECS’ Persist/Subscribe Model

ECS utilizes a Persist/Subscribe Method that captures, processes, and distribute data without having to write hundreds of processing rules. This method, along with ECS’ proprietary approach to data processing, allows businesses to deliver data to a series of parties and applications regardless of channel, format, language, schedule, and much more.
ECS’ Persist/Subscribe Model

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