ISO 20022 Extensible Financial Transaction Codes
ISO 20022 is a free and open standard for a single standardization approach to be used by all financial standards initiatives which includes methodology, process, and repository. ISO 20022 is a universal financial industry message scheme that defines the development of financial message standards. Its business modelling approach allows users and developers to represent financial business processes and underlying transactions in a formal but syntax-independent notation. These business transaction models are the “real” business standards. They can then be converted into user readable messages in the any other syntax or language. When ISO 20022 was originally developed, XML was the preferred syntax for internet communication. Therefore, the first edition of ISO 20022, published in December 2004, proposed a standardized XML-based syntax for messages. The second edition of the standard, published in May 2013, included the possibility to use ASN.1 as well. The standard was developed within the Technical Committee TC68 – Financial Services of ISO – the International Organization for Standardization.
It is mostly financial institutions interested in ISO 20022 that want to speed up their financial communication infrastructure and associated costs by opting for a single, common “language” for all financial communications, whatever the business domain, the communication network and other financial institution, client, supplier and market infrastructure. ISO 20022 is targeted at these standards initiatives that are generally driven by communities of users looking for more cost-effective communications to support specific financial business processes with a particular view of facilitating interoperability with other existing protocols.
The ISO 20022 standard consists of eight parts:
Part 1: Metamodel
Part 2: UML profile
Part 3: Modelling
Part 4: XML schema generation
Part 5: Reverse engineering
Part 6: Message transport characteristics
Part 7: Registration
Part 8: ASN.1 generation