How does ISO 20022 work?
ISO 20022 defines common business data, such as payer, payee, amount, purpose and remittance information, and message formats built from it, most often written in XML. In the European Payments Council’s guidelines for SEPA credit transfers, a customer instructs its bank with a pain.001 message and gets status reports such as pain.002, based on the 2019 version of the standard. Fields are structured: an address splits into parts such as town and country, and remittance information can carry a structured creditor reference instead of free text.
Why does it matter?
The Bank of England describes ISO 20022 as an open international standard that could become a common language for most payments, and says richer data will make it easier to detect fraud and target financial crime. CHAPS moved to it on 19 June 2023. For cross-border bank payments over Swift, PCBB reports that the coexistence period, when both legacy MT and ISO 20022 messages were accepted, ended on 22 November 2025. As an illustrative example: a merchant receives 3,000 bank transfers a month and 10% arrive with the order reference buried in a free-text line, so 300 need manual matching. If a structured reference survives end to end, most of those match automatically.
What are the limits?
Data is only as good as what the first sender fills in, and older systems can still truncate fields. Timelines differ by system: the European Payments Council’s guidelines allow only structured and hybrid addresses in SEPA credit transfers from 22 November 2026. Card authorizations follow separate card network messaging, so the standard mainly affects bank transfers and payouts.
Where does Omno use it?
Omno does not send bank messages itself: bank transfer, instant payment and payout methods run through connected PSPs, which handle the scheme formats. Statuses come back in one format across providers through webhooks, and reporting exports payments and payouts in one format, so the merchant’s own reference on each request supports matching.