By Bank of Jamaica
KINGSTON, Jamaica – Bank of Jamaica (‘the Bank’) is taking a lead role in co-ordinating Jamaica’s migration from the Swift Message Type (MT) standard to the ISO 20022 – ‘Universal Financial Industry Message Scheme’ format by end 2025.
Adoption of the ISO 20022 standard should improve payment processing efficiency and promote interoperability among financial institutions, financial market infrastructures and end-users. This initiative is part of the bank’s strategic vision to enhance end-to-end efficiency for payments.
ISO 20022 is a multi-part International Standard that enables a common global “language” for the development of messages in the payments, cards and related financial services, securities, foreign exchange trading, derivatives and trade services sectors. The main ingredients of the standard are a development methodology, a registration process and a central repository.
The ISO 20022 standard’s methodology describes business processes and a common business language, which can be rendered in different syntaxes enabling implementation for messaging and application programming interfaces (APIs). The standard’s registration process ensures that business models are in compliance with the standard for the exchange of information for financial services. It is also supported by a central repository, which includes a data dictionary and a catalogue of messages – and is accessible to all. The ISO 20022 Dictionary helps the financial community align and do business by providing concise definitions for common business concepts.
The bank’s target is to ensure that the JamClear® systems will be updated to facilitate both the ISO 20022 standard and the current SWIFT MT standards by the second quarter of 2023. This is to allow participants that interface with JamClear® to transition at their own pace. The bank will facilitate coexistence of the ISO 20022 standard with the current SWIFT MT standards until November 2025.
Other entities will be required to notify the bank of their intention to adopt the standard and timeline for implementation.
All entities transitioning to the new standard are being asked to advise the bank by sending an e-mail to ISO20022@boj.org.jm by 29 April 2022.
