UNICREDIT: CHANGING PAYMENTS
Change is coming: TARGET2 and ISO 20022 migration will, in effect, happen at the same time for many banks
BANKS’
‘BIG BANG’
MOMENT
The countdown has begun to two major changes to European payments infrastructure. Meeting the deadline for both TARGET2 and ISO 20022 migration will be tough, but worth it says Raphael Barisaac, UniCredit’s Global Head of Cash Management and Global Co-head of Trade In the heyday of English seaside coin arcades, there was always a penny push machine. You fed your pennies in until enough of them built up behind those perched precipitously on the edge for them to fall into the cash dispenser.
There was a heart-stopping moment when the weight of all those pennies literally hung in the balance – until the urge for them to move became irresistible.
22 FintechFinancePresents
Just such a moment has been reached in the accumulation of systems, regulations, standards and reforms edging the eurozone towards a fully-realised, fully- integrated financial infrastructure. It’s been a long time coming, but the payout, in terms of infrastructure resilience, greater efficiency, improved security, access to new technologies and better usability for the EU’s central banks, retail banks and central securities depositories (CSDs), is huge.
2020 Special
The vision for the ‘last mile’ of this journey towards a harmonised system, and an outline roadmap for getting there, was originally set out by Eurosystem, the monetary authority for the eurozone, in 2015, a year after the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) – another important milestone in the harmonisation project – became fully operational in all states using the euro. Eurosystem’s proposal, worked up in
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