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Since 1989, Bottomline has been modernizing global business payments with connected solutions for more than 800,000 financial institutions and businesses in 92 countries.
Securely and efficiently manage funds disbursements
For Businesses
Streamline the collection and management of single and recurring payments
Direct submission and processing of your UK bank payments for payables and receivables
Centralize and automate all your payment creation, controls, and submissions
Comprehensive connectivity to Swift and other domestic and global financial messaging networks
For Banks & Financial Institutions For Businesses
Convert legacy financial message formats to modern message standards
For Banks & Financial Institutions
Easily view analytics of financial messages with central repository
Reduce fraud and errors through digital account verification
Efficiently screen transactions to identify and manage sanctions risk
Stop payment fraud before it happens. Detect, investigate, and protect against internal and external threats.
View, optimize, and forecast your cash position with all accounts connected in one solution
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Manage your ISO 20022 strategy in one place and effortlessly meet the next deadline in November 2026 for the transition to structured or hybrid addresses.
The phased adoption of structured data fields offers various advantages for the global financial ecosystem:
Enhanced data: Provides a richer, more detailed data model that allows for more information to be included with payments.
Efficient processing: Enables greater automation and reduces manual intervention, which in turn minimizes payment delays.
Improved compliance: Helps financial institutions meet Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and sanctions-screening requirements with more precise, structured data.
Better reconciliation: Offers richer remittance information, which improves reconciliation for corporate clients.
Increased transparency: Allows for greater end-to-end transparency and easier tracking of payments.
November 2025: This is a critical milestone, often called the "end of coexistence," for cross-border payments.
Swift MT retirement: The legacy Swift MT messages will be retired for financial institution payment instructions (MT 1xx and 2xx series), requiring financial institutions to use the new ISO 20022 formats (pacs.008 and pacs.009).
Introduction of hybrid addresses: Hybrid address formats will be permitted for cross-border and domestic cross-border and CHAPS payments, which require a minimum of a structured town/city and country. Swift will also provide an AI tool to help institutions structure existing address data.
Post-November the 2025 end of the co-existence period the immediate focus will be on leveraging the rich, enhanced data and creating strong use cases.
As global payment systems modernise, ISO 20022 has evolved from being just a messaging standard to becoming the foundation of data-rich, interoperable, and transparent payments across borders.
Source: The Future of Competitive Advantage in Banking and Payments Global Report 2025
Everything you need to know about ISO 20022 to get started
ISO 20022 is the emerging global standard for payments messaging. It creates a common language and model for payments data across the globe, which provides higher-quality payment information than other standards and adapts to new needs and approaches.
Many Market Infrastructures, including Swift, are moving their messages to ISO 20022 over the next 2 years. Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) and TARGET2 Euro payment (T2) are on track for delivery, plus Swift will adopt the rulebook of the Cross-Border Payments Reporting (CBPR+) working group, where there will be a coexistence phase of MT/MX messages up until 2025. Within five years, it’s predicted that around 80% of high-value global payments by volume and 90% by value will have migrated to ISO 20022.
The challenges will be multiple and grow with time. Until you are ISO 20022 Native, you will need to manage translation, enrichment, and a co-existence of standards with counterparties and across your back-office systems. It will increasingly be difficult to manage the data required in ISO 20022 in the legacy standards.
A simple connectivity upgrade can be completed at a relatively low cost and over a few months. However, it is the wider impact of ISO 20022 that needs to be considered. Payment, Screening, Matching, and Monitoring Systems need to be able to support ISO 20022 and the additional data elements and increased structure and granularity. This will require upgrades, development, and project work to improve static data. This work will vary enormously by institution.
Technically there is more data to hold, process, and exchange. As a standard, it is more flexible and allows for more data to be exchanged. Market Practice will be key to ensuring that there is consistency in what is expected for transactions in each market. Along with global alignment through such groups as HVCS and CBPR.
Most institutions will be technically ready to receive ISO 20022 in 2023, but many will still be processing in the legacy standards. We will then have a multi-year period of co-existence as markets and participants move over to using ISO 20022. We may see a slow take-up in the beginning and then a snowball effect as main markets and players start to send and ask to receive ISO 20022.
Starting to use ISO 20022 is not the end of the journey. Once participants are familiar with the standard, this will then be the catalyst for the introduction of more structured information. This will then be the beginning of the real benefits of adopting ISO 20022.
Supports transparency and interoperability for domestic and cross-border payments.
Lowers operating and transaction costs.
Improves customer data insights and compliance to payment standards.
Increases automation and reduces manual intervention.
Richer customer data aids reconciliation and enhances fraud capabilities.
Creates new revenue streams through digital overlays.
Improves customer service and the ability for customers to self-serve.
Optimises business cycle cash flow.
As a satisfied customer, we were confident that by partnering with Bottomline on the message transformation project, we would achieve our primary objective of being able to comply with the ISO 20022 messaging standards within the deadlines set by the BSP. Choosing Bottomline to work with on this project was simply a given.
The experience of onboarding to Bottomline’s hosted Universal Aggregator solution was straightforward, quick and seamless with the great assistance of the Bottomline project team to help with queries and the end-to-end process. The solution, alongside Bottomline’s Secure Payments, allows us to focus on the bank’s core business operations, whilst minimising the risk of payment fraud.
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