July 8, 2025—On Monday, July 14, 2025, Federal Reserve Financial Services will complete a one-day implementation of the ISO® 20022 financial messaging format for the Fedwire® Funds Service. This is a significant step in the modernization of the U.S. payments system. Establishing a common language for financial transaction messages will lead to payment rail interoperability, domestically and globally, and the development of future payment innovations.
Introduced in 2004, ISO® 20022 has become the global standard for payments, foreign exchange, trade services, and securities. The ISO® 20022 format contains structured fields which allow for richer data than the prior legacy standard, which is itself already over 50 years old. Richer data provides greater transparency and traceability, improved processing and reconciliation, enhanced reporting and analytics, improved compliance outcomes, and more opportunities for full automation. Additionally, the structured messaging addresses many issues found in legacy messaging standards such as data truncation and inconsistent entry of mandatory data. Together, rich data and structured messaging cut through the payments standard “babble,” the formatting barriers that keep these complex payments systems from “speaking” to one another. ISO® 20022 has been broadly adopted in more than 70 countries, replacing numerous legacy and proprietary formats worldwide.
The FedNow® Service, the Federal Reserve Bank’s instant payments rail, launched in 2023 with ISO® 20022 in place. But replacing their existing Fedwire® Funds Service message format with a new messaging format proved more complex and there will be some differences between the platforms at launch. The Federal Reserve Banks have announced that they do not have immediate plans to migrate their other legacy systems, notably the Fedwire® Securities Service and FedACH Service, to the ISO® 20022 message standard, but many industry pundits believe that is the Fed’s intent and a logical conclusion. For private sector networks, the Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network also is built on ISO® 20022, and Nacha offers ISO® 20022-to-ACH mapping to facilitate accounts payable, receivable, and treasury functions.
EasCorp’s Domestic Wire Transfer Service is now ready for the ISO® 20022 migration, and our service users have received training and resources to prepare them for the transition. We look forward to continued development in the ISO 20022 format, and to the ongoing modernization of the U.S. payments ecosystem.