Harmonising high-value payments
Ah, the perfect harmony of high-value payments…
While it sounds like something for which you’d need to visit a doctor, Swift’s HVPS+ will likely be a talking point during the payments industry panels at this month’s Sibos. Announced in mid-August, the high-value payments system task force is an important component of Swift’s ISO 20022 harmonisation initiative.
A number of central banks, market infrastructures and banks from around the world are members of the task force. At present they are:
- ABN Amro
- Australian Payments Clearing Association
- Banca d’Italia
- Bank of America Merrill Lynch
- Bank of England
- EBA Clearing
- European Central Bank
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York
- FirstRand Bank
- Hong Kong Interbank Clearing Limited
- Payments Canada
- Société Générale
- Standard Bank
- The Clearing House
- Wells Fargo
The move is part of Swift’s ISO 20022 harmonisation initiative, which is a multi-pronged approach to promoting the standard. In October last year, an ISO 20022 Harmonisation Charter was endorsed by a number of organisations including the Australian Securities Exchange, Bank of Canada, Clearstream, Payments Canada (formerly Canadian Payments Association), Euroclear, Russia’s National Settlement Depository, the Southern African Development Community, ACH Colombia and VP Securities Denmark. The Charter outlines Swift’s proposal to work with financial market infrastructures to coordinate the roll-out of ISO 20022.
More than 20 market infrastructures have now endorsed the Charter and will apply it to their ISO 20022 adoption projects. The Charter aims to jointly implement a global framework enabling ISO 20022 harmonisation across the industry. A signing ceremony of the latest market infrastructures to commit to the Charter will take place at Sibos during September.
The Charter is based on four principles:
- Share information between financial market infrastructures about ISO 20022 usage;
- Adhere to global market practice where it exists and contribute to new global market practice initiatives;
- Introduce stricter message version control and release management process and timing;
- Publish up to date information about standards on a common platform, including market practice compliance, messages and versions used and message release timeline.
ISO 20022 is becoming the preferred securities and payments messaging standard for financial market infrastructures globally. As the standard proliferates, there is a danger of fragmentation as different interpretations of message versions, market practice rules and release cycles emerge. Swift believes that only coordinated action at an industry level can prevent such fragmentation. It is playing a coordinating role, bringing together financial market infrastructures and providing the technology and framework to facilitate harmonisation.
HVPS+ will address the evolving ISO 20022 standards requirements of high-value payments systems providers…
This is an excerpt. The full article is available in the September 2016 edition of Banking Technology.
