SWIFT creates market practice task force to cut out fragmentation in the payments space

The global market practice task force of markets infrastructures and banks created by SWIFT follows the launch of the ISO 20022 Harmonisation Charter, an industry-driven framework to facilitate the rollout of ISO 20022 globally. 

The aim of the task force is to address the evolving ISO 20022 standards requirements of high value payments systems (HVPS) providers. Fragmentation and the risk of multiple versions and flavours being adopted across various markets, leading to higher implementation costs are just a few of the topics the new standard harmonization intents to tackle.

HVPS+ will build on the existing HVPS market practice documented in MyStandards that focuses on ensuring interoperability with FIN messages in the cross-border space. The new group, which goes beyond current market practice, will deliver an additional set of ISO 20022 market practice guidelines for high value payments systems, taking into account the evolving needs of market infrastructures and their members, including more structured, accurate and richer end-to-end data.

As a result, it creates a common foundation on which major payments market infrastructures can build their community implementations, whilst supporting global interoperability.

The following organisations are participating in the new HVPS+ task force: 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 Ltd, Hong Kong Interbank Clearing Limited, Payments Canada, Société Générale, Standard Bank, The Clearing House, and Wells Fargo.

The task force started work at the end of June 2016 and expects to publish a first set of additional market practice guidelines in MyStandards, SWIFT’s online platform for sharing standards information, in Q4 2016/Q1 2017.