ISO 20022 migration

Payment systems across the world are migrating from legacy standards to ISO 20022, an international messaging standard that is expected to improve payment processing efficiency and interoperability.

In 2017, EBA CLEARING launched its EURO1 future positioning programme. Together with its participant community, the Company identified user requirements and developed a roadmap for implementation. After an extensive user consultation, EBA CLEARING and its technology partner Swift kicked off the ISO 20022 migration project in 2018. The development phase started in November 2019 and proceeded as scheduled.

EURO1 successfully migrated to ISO 20022 in March 2023, in alignment with the T2 RTGS/T2S Consolidation project of the Eurosystem.

The core structure and key benefits of EURO1 have not change through the migration to ISO 20022.  

The key change is that, instead of processing payment messages via FIN MT messaging, EURO1 is now using ISO 20022’s data-rich standard, which can carry more payment information and is more flexible.

Furthermore, while readying EURO1 for the ISO 20022 migration, EBA CLEARING has brought efficiency enhancements to key parts of the EURO1 System functionality and now offers extended opening hours to its users. 

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 and improved data flows, which will increase the efficiency of transaction processing and fraud detection.

Participants will be able to offer services to their corporate clients that will benefit from better and faster information and reconciliation, greater transparency and more payer-to-payee information.

The migration of EURO1 to ISO 20022 has already delivered specific benefits to its participants:

• Extended opening hours, with the possibility to expand further
• Central payment and liquidity monitoring and steering capabilities across EBA CLEARING payment services (e.g. via liquidity dashboard)
• Full alignment with TARGET, allowing 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.