On 19 June 2023, the Bank of England (the Bank), working closely with the payments industry, migrated CHAPS, the UK’s high-value payments system, to ISO 2022, the latest global financial messaging standard.

This marks a significant milestone in the multi-year programme to renew the Bank’s Real Time Gross Settlement service, a programme whose objectives are to increase resilience, competition and innovation within the payments landscape. The next phase of the programme will be the introduction of the new core settlement engine for RTGS due in summer 2024.

Furthermore, it also marks a key milestone in the global transition of payments to ISO 20022. The ISO 20022 standards allows more data to be sent with payments and in a more structured format. ISO 20022 is an open international standard, which has the potential to create a single common language for most payments globally and deliver a wide range of benefits. In addition to the UK, many major jurisdictions have or are intending to implement ISO 20022 by November 2025, when SWIFT is scheduled to retire its existing MT message standard for cross-border payments. Pay.UK’s New Payments Architecture, which will replace the UK’s Faster Payments system in due course, will also use ISO 20022.