ISO 20022: MIGRATION STRATEGIES Transplant or bypass? There’s more than one way to survive the ISO 20022 trauma
MAJOR SURGERY... or is there a less painful way for firms to get their IT systems fit for ISO 20022? Elmar Handke, from UBS, and Volante Techologies’ Chris Stares, believe they’ve found the panacea Payments providers worldwide are working frantically to hit the winter 2022 deadline for implementing the new ISO 20022 messaging standard. But, do financial organisations need to put their legacy systems ‘under the knife’ and carry out costly infrastructure transplants to have a hope of achieving that? No they don’t, says Elmar Handke, who is responsible for IT infrastructure and payments messaging at UBS – and even if that were the best option, they simply don’t have time. He explains that UBS is currently in rude health, ISO 20022-wise, after discovering the ideal balance between timely and
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well-planned IT system redevelopment, and well-chosen plug-and-play solutions, such as those provided by technology partner Volante Technologies. One of the most revolutionary changes so far in the way payments are handled, ISO 20022 is largely welcomed by industry players, who recognise its potential to radically improve failure rates by including significantly more data in every message, as well as cracking long-running conundrums such as real-time cross-border transaction processing – essential efficiencies for an industry battling to preserve bottom lines amidst the pandemic-induced explosion in high-volume, low-value payments. However, the medicine needed to make their payment processing systems better,
in time, is proving a bitter pill to swallow for many organisations. Low- or no-code solutions such as those provided by Volante could represent the ‘spoonful of sugar’ the industry needs to help it go down though, explains Handke. “We analysed the proposals – especially the CBPR+ push from SWIFT that will hit us in 2023 – and discovered we had close to 100 IT systems that required an update,” he says. “Looking at that, we also realised the timeline of the project did not start from that point of recognition; it had started already. Basically, at the beginning of 2020, we realised the timeline was too short to get all our systems up to the market standard, so we had to come up with a mitigation strategy.” ffnews.com
