After much speculation about further delays, the Federal Reserve announced in June that it is sticking to its plans to adopt the ISO 20022 standard for the Fedwire® Funds Service on July 14, 2025. With this single-day implementation, the Fed will sunset the Fedwire Application Interface Manual (FAIM) format, replacing all FAIM messages with ISO 20022 messages.

The Fed had previously announced an implementation deadline of March 10, 2025, before moving it back to July. The Fedwire migration follows The Clearing House’s successful migration of the CHIPS® network to ISO 20022 last year.

ISO 20022 Migration

ISO 20022 is a common global messaging standard that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) syntax, allowing for more efficient and cohesive cross-border transactions. It allows for richer data to be sent via payment messages, including payment initiation, interbank settlement and cash management. ISO 20022 can also be used for domestic payments.

It is important to remember that the ISO 20022 migration deadlines are for banks, not their corporate clients. However, corporate practitioners should be making their migration plans as soon as possible.

For treasury and enterprise payments teams not using treasury management systems (TMSs), they may have to rely heavily on their banking partners and their IT teams to help with implementation.

Lee-Ann Perkins, CTP, Assistant Treasurer and Senior Director for the global management consulting and advisory firm Ankura, and a featured speaker at the AFP 2025 Payments Keynote, explained that her team has been relying on their banks, as well as IT, in getting their cross-border payments set up within the ISO framework. However, she noted that since the deadlines have gotten pushed back frequently, IT has often had to prioritize other more time-sensitive projects ahead of the migration.

Perkins provided a checklist for treasury departments to assess their IT teams’ efforts throughout the migration:

• Payment system integration: IT needs to upgrade ERP/TMS systems to handle the new payment formats (e.g., pain.001) and ensure bank connectivity supports ISO 20022. Middleware or APIs may also need to be implemented to translate legacy formats into XML messages.
• Data Structure and Mapping: IT should work with treasury to map existing data fields (e.g., payment references, beneficiary details, remittance information) to ISO 20022 structures. IT also must align master data (e.g., vendor and customer banking details) with ISO requirements like structured addresses and BIC/IBAN formats.
• Testing and Validation: IT should set up sandbox environments to test ISO 20022 messages with banks and service providers, validate message schemas and conduct end-to-end transaction testing to ensure data integrity.
• Security and Compliance: IT must ensure secure file transfers (SFTP, APIs, SWIFTNet) and encryption of payment files. IT should also assist with compliance reviews, including data retention, audit logging and fraud detection enhancements enabled by ISO 20022’s rich data format.
• Change Management and User Training: IT should create documentation and tools to help treasury users understand and adopt new processes. IT should also establish training programs to explain data entry changes (e.g., structured remittance information or creditor identifiers).
• Ongoing Monitoring and Support: IT should build dashboards and alerts for payment message failures, format errors, or bank rejections and support ongoing patches, upgrades and format evolution.

What’s Next?

The next major deadline for ISO 20022 is November 22, 2025, when the coexistence period for MT and ISO 20022 (MX) messages on the Swift network is slated to end. After the deadline, data related to payment parties must not be lost or truncated along the end-to-end processing chain; Swift said it cannot guarantee this if a transaction originates in MX and is converted to MT. Swift encourages corporates to adopt the standard as soon as possible to benefit from the data capabilities that ISO 20022 offers and to avoid challenges in the future.

Later this month, AFP will release a new payments guide, underwritten by Wells Fargo, Seismic Shifts Are Coming for Cross-Border Payments, which will feature an in-depth section on ISO 20022 adoption.