13/07/2021 - ISO20022 Payments 2020/2021 Maintenance

In February, the ISO 20022 SEG released new versions of ca. 90 message definitions of the Payments Maintenance stack in its 2020/2021 Maintenance. While in many cases the changes mainly fixed technical or semantical errors in existing message elements, i.e., no changes to the existing message structure, there are also noticeable changes to the structure of certain messages by the introduction or amendment of message elements. Most changes relate to Cash Management (camt) and Payments Clearing and Settlement (pacs) and may therefore be relevant mainly for Banks and other Financial Institutions but also Payment Initiation (pain) and Payment Mandates messages relevant for the Manufacturing Industry are affected.

Below are some of the changes the writer finds most significant while of course there are others worth mentioning as well.

1. The cardinality of segment Identification of Type CashAccount38, introduced in the 2018/2019 Maintenance and among others used in CreditorAccount and DebtorAccount, changes from mandatory (“1_1”) to optional (“0_1”). This is to ascertain that if a proxy such as a mobile number or email address is provided instead of a traditional account number or IBAN this very information included in the a. m. Identification element does not have to be provided any longer in addition, thus making the substitution use case finally feasible. In addition to this a new rule (IdentificationOrProxyPresenceRule) and a new guideline (IdentificationAndProxyGuideLine), to be found in the Constraints section of the message definition (CR21 and CR20) have been added to support the changes. Most messages covered by the Maintenance are affected by this change thereby underlining its significance.

2. The Account Proxy / Alias elements introduced in the 2018/2019 Maintenance are now also available in the acmt.022, acmt.023 and acmt.024 messages. These message formats, mainly used to request and inform upon the correctness of party and account information, did not yet contain these elements and could therefore not be used in combination with the newer message definitions of the 2018/2019 Maintenance.

3. To cater a request by the China Foreign Exchange Trade System to “…limit exchange rate fluctuations in settlement sales and foreign exchange operations…” optional exchange rate high and low limit elements allowing for the statement of either a percentage or rate were added to the ReturnCurrencyExchangeRate (camt.017) message. The information provided in either of these fields informs the requestor of the currency exchange information of the minimum or maximum upward or downward fluctuation of exchange rates as allowed by the Currency Authority.

4. Being a pretty obvious error to its original definition the Year element in type TaxPeriod3 is now defined as ISOYear (YYYY format) as opposed to ISODate (YYYY-MM-DD format) in TaxPeriod2. This may seem negligible or rather of technical interest but as it is contained in the parent TaxInformation10 element a total of 33 message definitions all across Account Switching, Cash Management, Payments Clearing and Settlement, Payments Initiation and others are affected and consequently will have to be changed in order to comply with the latest standard.

The full list of changes incorporated into the new Maintenance and messages affected by it can be found in the attachment of this article.