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Federal Reserve Announces ISO 20022 Migration Timeline for the Fedwire® Funds Service

October 18, 2017, 3:00 p.m. EDT

The Federal Reserve Banks today announced plans to complete their migration to the ISO 20022 standard for their real-time gross settlement system, the Fedwire Funds Service, by the end of 2023. Adopting the ISO 20022 standard for payments clearing and settlement messages supports the Federal Reserve’s strategy to enhance the efficiency of both domestic and cross-border payments as described in Strategies for Improving the U.S. Payment System: Federal Reserve Next Steps in the Payments Improvement Journey.

Given the criticality of the Fedwire Funds Service, the Federal Reserve Banks have planned a controlled migration to the new message format. Implementation of the ISO 20022 standard for the Fedwire Funds Service will be completed in three phases, beginning in November 2020 and ending in late 2023.

“The Federal Reserve collaborated with customers and the industry at large to define how the ISO 20022 message format would be used to improve the end-to-end efficiency of payments settled through the Fedwire Funds Service, as well as to enhance the information content carried in Fedwire messages,” said Richard Dzina, executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and product director for the Federal Reserve Banks’ wholesale financial services. “This initiative is part of the Fed’s strategic vision to promote greater innovation for our nation’s payment system to ensure that it remains well integrated in an increasingly global marketplace.”

In the coming months, the Federal Reserve Banks will focus on educating Fedwire Funds Service participants about these changes, including making format documentation available to them years in advance to help them better plan and prepare for the phased implementation.

More information about the ISO 20022 initiative for the Fedwire Funds Service can be found at the Federal Reserve Banks’ Resource Center for Adoption of ISO 20022 for Wire Transfers and ACH Payments (Off-site) page on the FedPaymentsImprovement.org website (Off-site).

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