Now’s the Time for your Company to Adopt ISO 20022

​

• 

  Future-proofing large businesses

• 

  Creating efficiencies for small and mid-sized businesses

Among your company’s many priorities, it is critical that you look for ways to improve efficiency and protect yourself against fraud. Adopting next-generation payment methods, such as the ISO 20022 standard, can help businesses of all sizes make fast, secure data-rich payments while positioning their operations for the future.

ISO 20022​ is an international standard for financial information that includes all payment reconciliation information in a structured form. The use of ISO 20022 as a common standard message format will result in benefits for you and your customers.

For your treasury function, it means less manual intervention, more accurate compliance processes, and reduced risk of payments fraud due to greater transaction security. It also allows you to offer your customers more transparency regarding payment fees, remittance information and estimated settlement times.

While all businesses can reap the benefits of ISO 20022, how you take advantage of them depends on the size and complexity of your business.

While many large businesses consider the ISO 20022 standard to be a solution for the future, it can deliver significant benefits to your business right now.

You can use robust data to improve your payment experiences by enabling automation to extract and process data more efficiently. Reducing the need for manual intervention decreases likelihood of human errors and improves operational efficiencies, leading to potential cost reductions.

Rich payment data also enables better payments transparency, which helps minimize fraudulent activities and supports your ability to comply with evolving regulatory requirements. And finally, richer remittance data allows information, such as invoices and payments-associated data, to be included in a structured manner which reduces the risk of errors or misinterpretation.

A great example of how large businesses can benefit from the adoption of ISO 20022 is by having ISO 20022 built into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) infrastructure.

Major ERP vendors have built ISO 20022 into their systems. And financial institutions, including BMO, are also investing more in ISO 20022 to make it more accessible for our large business customers. So, if you upgrade your ERP system, supporting future payment services based on the standard will require significantly less development on your part. Along with future-proofing your internal operations, ISO 20022 can help you meet the evolving needs of your customers and vendors.

While implementing changes to your ERP system can be costly and time-consuming, there’s value in making an ERP system upgrade a priority, even if it’s ahead of schedule. Along with improving account reconciliation and eliminating manual processes immediately, implementing ISO 20022 can help position your operation for the future.

​

With the higher costs of doing business, it’s crucial to make sure your workers are spending time on higher-value tasks that make your core operation more productive.

Do you have an employee making regular deposits at a bank branch? Does someone spend a large portion of their day manually reviewing payment stubs and allocating the payments in your system? If an employee’s time could be better spent on other tasks, it’s worth asking about solutions that can improve your efficiency.

Unlike larger corporations, small and mid-sized businesses don’t necessarily have to make a substantial investment in finances, time or resources to take advantage of ISO 20022. As more banks incorporate the standard into their services, these companies may be able to take advantage of their benefits and make more efficient use of their internal resources.

While there’s probably a fee for accessing these features, the cost of using the service is significantly less than the cost of the opportunistic time lost involved in cheque processing. When you consider the time involved in processing cheques, from obtaining approvals to inputting the reconciliation information, the cost associated with your financial provider’s ISO 20022-compliant online banking services is relatively small.

Regardless of the size of your business, adopting ISO 20022 can ensure faster, safer and more transparent payments, delivering immediate and long-term benefits for both you and your customers.

Dan Jansen, Head, North American Payments; Luk Boral, Head, North American Delivery; and Stephanie Chan, Senior Product Manager, contributed to this article.

​