Following recent news that the European Payments Council (EPC) postponed the SEPA payment scheme's ISO 20022 migration by four months, it began to feel a little like groundhog day in the Finextra offices.

In response, we decided to pull together all of the times since 2020 that we’ve seen delays to ISO 20022 migrations for payment schemes across the globe – please reach out to us or add a comment below if you think we’ve missed any!

October 2023: In October 2023 the European Payments Council postponed the migration of SEPA payment schemes to the 2019 version of ISO 20022 by four months, to March, after concluding that "at least two large SEPA countries" couldn't be guaranteed to make the original November deadline.

February 2023: The Clearing House (TCH), responding to the recommendation of CHIPS participants, rescheduled the CHIPS ISO 20022 implementation from November 2023 to April 2024. The decision to move to a new implementation date was influenced by similar decisions from other global payments network providers whose ISO 20022 implementation calendars precede the CHIPS migration and have also been rescheduled. CHIPS is the largest private sector high-value clearing and settlement system in the world. 

November 2022: Canada's high-value payment system's move to ISO 20022 was delayed until March 2023 in order to keep in step with the recently postponed migration to the message standard by Swift and the Eurosystem. Canada's Lynx was set to go live with its second release in November 2022, introducing ISO 20022. However, while the technology needed to support the release will still be deployed as planned, it will not be activated until March 2023.

October 2022: Swift postponed its ISO 20022 migration to March 2023, citing members' desire to keep in line with the Eurosystem migration, which was delayed by the ECB earlier in October 2022. Swift said that it was ready for the ISO 20022 migration for cross-border payments and reporting (CBPR+) from November 2022.

October 2022: The ECB delayed the launch of the Eurosystem's new real-time gross settlement system and central liquidity management model, T2 - which is based around the use of the new messaging standard - from November 2022 to March 2023 in order to give some member states more time for testing.

October 2022: The Financial Stability Board extended the timeline for ISO 20022 harmonisation from December 2022 until December 2023.

June 2022: The Federal Reserve delayed the implementation of the new ISO 20022 payment messaging format by two years, to 2025. The Fed had previously set a deadline of November 2023 for a cutover to the extended payment message format, in line with its implementation by Swift and other global money transfer networks. The agency said that it will instead opt for a one-day cutover on 10 March 2025. The Fed said the revised timeline is in response to bank concerns that it was prioritising the introduction of the new messaging format to the detriment of the roll out of the FedNow real-time transfer network, which is also set to debut in November 2003.

January 2022: In January 2022, the BoE announced a change to its plan to migrate its Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) scheme, known as CHAPS, scheduled for June 2022. The BoE had planned to go live using a like-for-like approach, (using a restricted version of the ISO standard that was in line with the FIN MT standard). This would have been followed by the full ISO 20022 transition in February 2023. Under its revised plans, the BoE said CHAPS would migrate in April 2023 as a 'big-bang' transition, rather than the like-for-like implementation. This 'big-bang' date was again pushed back to June 2023.

January 2022: American Bankers Association expressed “serious concern” about the lack of detail around the migration to ISO 20022 for Fedwire as a single day switch.

March 2021: Doubts raised about the ‘big bang’ migration scheduled for November 2022. “There are renewed doubts within the financial industry about the timetable for an essential part of the ISO 20022 migration in Europe, the T2/T2S consolidation.” The following month, the Bundesbank replaced the head of its payments division at short notice.

Source: @DPS_Gruppe

November 2020: Bank of England announced CHAPS & RTGS ISO 20022 migration would take place in 2022, however, the implementation date would move from April to June 2022.

October 2020: Not an ISO 20022 delay -specifically- but in October 2020 the Governing Council of the ECB has decided to reschedule the launch of the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS) from November 2022 to November 2023. This development follows the Governing Council’s earlier decision to extend the timeline of the T2-T2S consolidation project by one year. This was a result of the ISO 20022 postponement earlier in 2020.  

March 2020: Swift delayed the original ISO 20022 migration date for cross border payments by 12 months, from November 2021 to the end of 2022, as banks struggled with decommissioning and preparing existing infrastructure for the transition. The decision to delay was made following feedback from the Swift community about the impending deadline. While institutions have an extra year of system co-existence initially, the ultimate deadline for decommissioning the legacy Swift MT standard remained in place as 2025.