IFX Forum White Paper on New ISO 20022 Stand-alone Remittance Messages
The Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) Forum has published a white paper entitled
‘Understanding the ISO 20022 Stand-Alone Remittance Messages.’
The paper aims to assist the adoption of the new remittance messages submitted by the Forum and collaborating organisations to ISO 20022 earlier this year. It is available for download at no charge from the Forum website.
The IFX Forum is an international non-profit industry association, with its US head office in Wakefield, Massachusetts, whose mission is to develop and promote the adoption of its open, interoperable standard for financial data exchange, IFX.
ISO 20022 is an international standard for financial services messaging, with a repository containing descriptions of messages and business processes. Remittance information is exchanged between a buyer and a seller to ‘explain’ a payment.
The new messages provide a standard approach for electronic remittance delivery, and their use will eliminate issues in reconciling electronic payments and further enable straight-through-processing of payments. Because these stand-alone messages can be used both inside and outside payment delivery channels, adoption can advance quickly. Businesses can begin to utilise the messages for business-to-business (B2B) exchanges in the knowledge that financial institutions will be using the same standard.
The white paper provides in-depth background about the ISO 20022 stand-alone remittance messages; why they were developed, how they were developed, the use cases they address, and the case for adoption of the messages by industry and financial service providers. Many examples are included in order to familiarize the reader with the structure and capabilities of the messages.
“The new remittance messages are designed to standardise remittance data exchange in a way that is flexible enough to adapt to current business practices and uniform enough to provide a good avenue forward,” said Richard P. Urban, president of the IFX Forum.
“Our white paper covers the rationale behind the messages’ construction as well as useful information for implementing them, which we hope will be helpful in enabling their adoption.”