April 2025: On the Wire - ISO® 20022 Newsletter
Finalize your preparedness and contingency plans
FRFS will transition to the ISO® 20022 format for the Fedwire® Funds Service on July 14, 2025. As part of your overall readiness preparations for the upcoming migration, we highly recommend that you finalize your preparedness and contingency plans as soon as possible. It is critical that you have a contingency plan in the event that you are not ready to send or receive ISO 20022 messages through the Fedwire Funds Service or your wire ecosystem is not ready for ISO 20022 messages beginning July 14.
Please review our preparedness checklists (review the checklists that apply to your profile) to help you finalize your own preparedness plan, and consider the following strategies for your contingency plan.
Contingency strategies
- Establish new or validate existing correspondent banking arrangements (e.g., bankers’ bank, corporate credit union) through which you may send and receive payment messages on and after July 14.
- Develop a plan for how your correspondent account will be funded if you have issues (e.g., a communication plan with counterparties to route payments to your correspondent account rather than to your master account).
- Ensure you have sufficient trained staff to send ISO 20022 messages through the FedPayments® Manager – Funds application via the FedLine Advantage® Solution (i.e., manual entry message screens or import/upload feature).
- Increase staffing for manual processing of payments, including processing by upstream and downstream applications (e.g., ancillary systems like OFAC and fraud screening).
- Ensure staff reviews procedures for manually processing incoming messages (e.g., treasury management, posting credits to your customers’ accounts, reconciliation activities).
- Explore the use of an ISO 20022 message translation service.
FRFS is providing information on actions to take to prepare for the ISO 20022 transition and potential contingency strategies for your convenience only. Your institution is responsible for developing its own preparedness and contingency plans, and FRFS assumes no liability if your institution is unable to send or receive ISO 20022 or other payment messages on and after July 14.
Include the Discount Window in your contingency planning
Prepare for contingency events by incorporating access to the Federal Reserve Banks’ Discount Window (Off-site) into your planning. The Discount Window helps institutions manage their liquidity risks efficiently by providing a contingency funding source. To learn more about current interest rates, relevant guidance and eligibility, visit the Discount Window site and choose the “Select Your District” tab to find your district contact information.
Continue testing up until migration weekend
All customers should test on Tuesdays and Thursdays to mimic sending production-like traffic in ISO 20022 message formats in the DIT2 environment. As you conduct DIT2 testing, ensure that incoming test messages are processed normally by your ancillary systems (e.g., funds are credited to the appropriate party and can be processed by your compliance systems). No forms are required, and there is no need to coordinate with other institutions.
If you want to coordinate testing with another financial institution, please sign up to join the DIT2 peer testing community, which has close to 550 testing participants. Once you are signed up, you will receive a weekly email containing all the testing participants so that you can connect directly with other institutions on the list to coordinate peer testing (e.g., when to test, what to test).
Important reminders for FedLine Advantage users
All customers that use the FedLine Advantage Solution in any capacity to send and receive messages should review the following steps to prepare for the upcoming July 14 migration:
- Learn new ISO 20022 screens: The ISO 20022 message screens and required content are significantly different, so it is imperative that your wire operations team familiarizes themselves with the new screens and features. Review our training materials posted in the FedPayments Manager – Funds application following the “Help” link as shown below.
- Virtual training sessions are available through June. If you have not received the registration information, you can contact us.
- Complete attestation ASAP: The deadline to complete your attestation has passed. Please have one of your Funds Supervisor or Funds Manager subscribers click on the “Complete Attestation” button in the DIT2 test environment to attest you have (i) trained your staff to use the new ISO 20022 screens and (ii) successfully sent ISO 20022 test messages that are representative of the outgoing messages you send today.
- Review the migration weekend implementation playbook: This document, available via the “Help” link shown above, provides FedLine Advantage customers with a schedule of key activities for planning purposes during the ISO 20022 migration weekend (i.e., Friday, July 11, 2025, through Monday, July 14, 2025) and through Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
- Prepare your entire wire ecosystem: Inventory the systems that support your wire operations (i.e., upstream and downstream systems), reach out to your internal software developers or vendors, and take action to ensure readiness for the ISO 20022 migration.
Response needed on readiness survey
We are currently fielding a follow-up survey to gauge your institution’s readiness for the July 14 migration. We also want to know your contingency plan in the event that your institution is not ready. The first wave of survey requests was sent on April 8, and the next wave is targeted for distribution in early May. If you receive the survey request from frbsurveys@chi.frb.org, please have an individual responsible for your institution’s wire operation complete and return the short survey as soon as possible. If you indicated to us that you were “fully ready” via the January 2025 survey, then you should not receive another survey. For questions about the survey, please contact us.
Updated Quick Reference Guide on MyStandards
Please review our updated chapter on the use of ISO 20022 messages related to payments received in the legacy FAIM format. Refer to the Document Change History section for an overview of changes.
Public page: Fedwire Funds Service ISO 20022 Quick Reference Guide (April 2024)
Register for upcoming drop-in sessions
Three more drop-in sessions are available for you to ask all your ISO 20022 questions. Go to our ISO 20022 Education page, where you can also view our series of ISO 20022 on-demand webinars.
More information
We are here to help you! Please contact us, your relationship manager or Wholesale Testing Services with any questions you have about this newsletter or the ISO 20022 migration.
Be sure to bookmark the Fedwire Funds Service ISO 20022 Implementation Center so you have access to the latest information about ISO 20022.