Large-value payment system EURO1 successfully migrates to ISO 20022

EBA CLEARING announced today that its systemically important payment system EURO1 has successfully migrated to ISO 20022. Yesterday, the RTGS-equivalent payment infrastructure closed its first business day operating on the new message standard. The changeover to ISO 20022 was executed in cooperation with the EURO1 community and EBA CLEARING’s technology partner Swift, in alignment with the T2/T2S Consolidation project of the Eurosystem.   

The EURO1 migration is part of an ongoing industry-wide shift towards ISO 20022, which will have far-reaching benefits for the payments industry. These include greater interoperability between various payment systems as well as increased efficiency of transaction processing and fraud detection. EURO1 participants will be able to offer services to their corporate clients, which will benefit from better structured and faster information and reconciliation, greater transparency and more payer-to-payee information.

This move also completes the implementation of the EURO1 future positioning programme, which EBA CLEARING started to develop and implement with its service users in 2017. Aside from introducing the data-rich ISO 20022 standard for EURO1, EBA CLEARING now provides its service users with extended opening hours for the system as well as central monitoring and steering capabilities for their payment and liquidity flows across the different payment services operated by the Company. The future positioning programme also ensures full alignment of EURO1 with TARGET, which allows continued possibility to switch payment flows between the two systems and enables EURO1 users to rely on the system as a non-similar back-up for T2 RTGS.

Jette Bennett, Team Leader EURO1/STEP1 Services, EBA CLEARING, said:

“The ISO 20022 migration concludes an important chapter in the success story of EURO1 and opens the door to a wide range of new opportunities that our users can leverage for their customers. A big thank-you goes to our EURO1 participants for their great guidance, efforts and commitment throughout this journey as well as to Swift for their relentless support as critical service provider for EURO1.”

Erwin Kulk, Head of Service Development and Management, EBA CLEARING, said:

“With this migration, we have put the powerful functionality of EURO1 and its extremely high levels of availability and robustness onto the latest technology rails. Our users can now leverage the liquidity efficiency and cost effectiveness of the system during longer opening hours and extend to their customers the benefits of structured data based on international standards.”

Pat Antonacci, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Swift, said:

“Financial institutions and infrastructures around the world have embraced ISO 20022 for its potential to unlock significant new opportunities in both payments processing and service innovation. EBA CLEARING's successful migration puts Europe at the forefront of realising those possibilities, and we look forward to working together to extend the benefits of rich data across the cross-border payment ecosystem.”

EURO1 is a large-value payment system for single same-day euro transactions at a pan-European level. Launched for the start of the European Monetary Union in 1999, the system processes transactions of high priority and urgency, and primarily of large amount, both at a domestic and at a cross-border level. Since 2014, EURO1 has been classified as a systemically important payment system by the European Central Bank (ECB).

EURO1 counts 34 participants and 35 sub-participants and processes an average of 180,000 transactions per day with a combined value of over EUR 190 billion. The system also supports the STEP1 Service, which offers a turn-key solution for single euro payment processing mainly used by smaller and medium-sized banks.

EBA CLEARING is a provider of pan-European payment infrastructure solutions processing 19 billion payments a year. Founded in 1998, the company is owned by 48 of the major banks operating in Europe and is based on a country-neutral governance model. The payment systems of EBA CLEARING are pan-European by design and desire: they are developed in close co-operation with the company’s multinational user community and best-of-breed technology partners.

EBA CLEARING manages and operates the payment services EURO1, STEP1, STEP2 and RT1. Both EURO1 and STEP2 have been classified as systemically important payment systems (SIPS) by the European Central Bank. RT1, the first pan-European real-time payment system, went live in 2017 and processes euro instant payments complying with the European Payments Council’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Scheme. In 2021, EBA CLEARING launched R2P, a request to pay messaging infrastructure service.

For more information on EBA CLEARING, please visit www.ebaclearing.eu, or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.