Your ISO 20022 migration guide

ISO 20022 is a flexible standard for financial messages that enables interoperability between financial institutions, market infrastructures and the Banks’ customers. All banks must be ready to support the new language/standard to continue processing payments and customers should also prepare for changes.

The ISO 20022 standard supports the inclusion of richer, better structured transaction data in payments messages, and aims to deliver a better customer experience by enabling less manual intervention, more accurate compliance processes, higher resilience, and improved fraud prevention measures.

ISO 20022 adoption will provide benefits to the entire payment ecosystem i.e. Banks, Market infrastructures and to the Banks’ customers:

• Rich structured party data and increased field size will provide greater levels of transparency and create efficiencies by reducing delays caused due to unstructured, incomplete, or inconsistent data.
• By adopting dedicated returns and investigation messages and using standardized return codes, the current delays in applying returned funds back to the customers and responding to inquiries from other Banks will be drastically reduced.
• By maintaining dedicated reference fields that remain unaltered in the end to end payment journey and introducing structured remittance data, customer’s reconciliation capabilities will be augmented.
• Greater message harmonisation across the entire payments industry, with a universal message type for all payments will help integrate with many more schemes on a faster basis.

We have initiated a multi-year transformation programme and is adopting a phased migration approach. As we roll out the changes, we’ll be providing communications on the updated file formats and HSBCnet payment screens. We will be able to provide enriched data for end-to-end cross-border transactions, as well as local payments where the local infrastructure has been updated to the ISO standard.

ISO 20022 adoption will take place over multiple years. Payment Market infrastructures (PMIs) of all major currencies are either live or in the process of adopting ISO 20022 by November 2025 for cross-border payments. Adoption plans are still evolving in each market and further clarity will be provided over time.

For more information about timelines, review the Timelines section

Swift plans to migrate all customer and inter-bank payments, as well as related advice and statement messages (the MT1xx, MT2xx and MT9xx series of messages) to standardised ISO 20022 formats.

In November 2025, cross-border payments and reporting (CBPR+) will utilise the ISO 20022 format and the MT1xx, MT2xx and MT9xx series of messages will be retired. This will be the end of Swift’s coexistence period.

With the implementation of the ISO 20022 standard, the following messages will carry the payment details:

Here's the list of ISO 20022 equivalent message formats that will replace MT messages:

ISO 20022 standardises the core parties involved in payment processing. Here are the various parties that you may need to include in your payment instructions.

• Debtor
  The party that owes an amount of money to the (ultimate) creditor.
• Ultimate debtor (called ‘Instructing party’ in HSBCnet)
  The party that bears the responsibility of making the payment (e.g. who the seller has sent the invoice). Ultimate debtor is used when the receiver of the invoice is different from the party sending the payment.
• Creditor
  The party to which an amount of money is due.
• Ultimate creditor (called ‘Final beneficiary’ in HSBCnet)
  The party that is the ultimate beneficiary of the payment (e.g. the payment is credited to an account of a financing company, but the ultimate beneficiary is the customer of the financing company).
• Forwarding agent
  The financial institution that receives the instruction from the initiating party and forwards it to the next agent in the payment chain for execution.
• Initiating party
  The party that initiates the payment. This may be the Debtor or a party acting on behalf of the debtor.
• Debtor agent
  The financial institution servicing an account for the debtor.
• Creditor agent
  The financial institution servicing an account for the creditor.

Currently, customers can include party details in their payments in either an unstructured or structured format. The unstructured address format doesn’t require Town Name and Country details to be provided. Hybrid address format will be introduced in November 2025 and gives customers another way to include standardised party information in their payments.

As part of ISO 20022 data standardisation, market infrastructures and clearing schemes have introduced new data requirements for party information. These include fields like creditor, ultimate debtor, initiating party, and ultimate creditor that will require corporates to provide to the bank in a structured or hybrid manner.

We strongly recommend you start looking at the data that is provided to HSBC and work closely with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Treasury Management System (TMS) providers to start making required updates to comply to the new industry requirements.

Here are examples of the different Swift ISO address formats:

You can submit the same instructions using the same file formats across all markets. However, HSBC will only be able to carry the end-to-end information in markets where local infrastructures are ISO 20022 ready.

Cross-border payments and reporting plus (CBPR+) is a group of payments experts who work to make sure that ISO 20022 standards are rolled out consistently by banks. CBPR+ guidelines provide a framework for how ISO 20022 messages are used and validated for cross-border payments and cash reporting across the Swift network.