ISO 20022
An international standard for electronic financial messaging that defines an XML-based data model for payments, securities, trade, cards, and FX — designed to replace legacy formats including SWIFT MT and country-specific schemas.
ISO 20022 is not a single message format but a methodology for defining financial messages from a shared business-data dictionary. The most widely adopted variants are the pain (payment initiation), pacs (payment clearing and settlement), and camt (cash management) families, each with several specific messages.
For reconciliation, the relevant messages are camt.053 (bank-to-customer statement, the ISO equivalent of MT940), camt.052 (intraday report, the equivalent of MT942), and camt.054 (debit/credit notification). These carry structured remittance information with dedicated fields for invoice references, end-to-end identifiers, and ultimate-debtor/creditor data — making automated matching dramatically easier than parsing MT940's free-text 86 field.
Adoption is being driven by SWIFT's migration plan, which set co-existence of MT and ISO 20022 through 2025 and full retirement of MT for cross-border payments thereafter. Domestic high-value systems including the Eurosystem TARGET2, the UK CHAPS, and the US CHIPS have already migrated. Indian RTGS migrated to ISO 20022 in 2024.