The ISO 20022 migration timeline
How the move from MT to ISO 20022 runs as a dated schedule — coexistence, domestic cut-overs, the end of MT, and structured addresses — not a single switch.
IN ONE LINE
Analogy: switching the world's payment messages from MT to ISO 20022 is less like flipping a switch and more like renovating a house you still have to live in.
You cannot empty the building for a night, so you refit one room at a time, keeping the old plumbing running until the new plumbing is proven.
For years the two systems run side by side — this overlap is called coexistence — so a payment can leave in the old format and arrive in the new one.
Only once every room is converted, and everyone has learned to use it, do the builders finally disconnect the old pipes.
The migration timeline is simply the published schedule of which room is finished when.
WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
The migration runs to a schedule rather than one single cut-over.
Cross-border payments over SWIFT began their coexistence period in March 2023, when banks could send and receive ISO 20022 messages alongside the old MT ones.
The big US high-value systems followed: CHIPS, the private-sector clearing house, moved in 2024, and the Fedwire Funds Service completed its cut-over in July 2025.
The cross-border coexistence period then ended in November 2025, retiring the legacy MT payment and cash-reporting messages for that traffic.
A few later steps remain — a mandatory move to structured addresses, and the retirement of the remaining statement messages — stretching into 2026, 2027, and 2028.
Reading the timeline is mostly about knowing which milestone applies to which rail.
HOW IT WORKS
For practitioners, the timeline is a set of message- and service-specific decisions.
On 22 November 2025 normal CBPR+ coexistence ended for in-scope FI-to-FI payment instructions; that did not retire every MT conversation.
Some instructions are NAKed, selected messages can enter temporary chargeable contingency conversion, and other reporting, initiation and investigation conversations follow separate roadmaps.
From 14 November 2026, in-scope CBPR+ traffic removes fully unstructured addresses and requires hybrid or fully structured data, subject to published message exceptions.
EPC scheme rulebooks use 15 November 2026.
Both changes require scope-controlled inventories rather than one estate-wide switch.
THE WORDS
- Coexistence period
- The stretch of time during which a network carries both the old message format and the new one, so no bank has to migrate on the same day as every other bank.
- Structured address
- A postal address whose parts — street, building number, town, postcode, country — each sit in their own labelled ISO 20022 element.
- Hybrid address
- A part-structured address: town and country sit in labelled elements while the rest of the address stays as free-text lines.
- Unstructured address
- A postal address held as free-text lines with no labelled parts — the legacy form ISO 20022 is phasing out for cross-border payments.
READ FIRST
CONNECTED TO
SOURCES
- ISO 20022 Standards (Swift ISO 20022 adoption programme) — Swift
- Cross-Border Payments and Reporting Plus (CBPR+) usage guidelines — Swift (CBPR+ working group)
- Fedwire Funds Service — Federal Reserve Financial Services
- Payments Signal editorial teaching models — Payments Signal
Derived from The ISO 20022 migration timeline. Every claim on this card is sourced on that page.