Fedwire® Funds Service November 2022 Changes
April 28, 2021
This communication provides important information about the Fedwire Funds Service. Please ensure this notice is delivered to individuals at your institution that need to prepare for this implementation.
Effective November 21, 2022, the Federal Reserve Banks will implement changes to the Fedwire Funds Service’s proprietary message format to support cross-border ISO® 20022 interoperability. SWIFT, TARGET2 operated by the European Central Bank, and EURO1 operated by EBA Clearing are expected to begin supporting fully enhanced ISO 20022 messages on this date. The Clearing House also plans to make changes to CHIPS®, private-sector U.S. wire transfer system, to support cross-border interoperability.
What’s in Scope
The following changes will be made to tag {8200} Unstructured Addenda Information. All Fedwire Funds Service participants must be able to receive messages that include these changes. Fedwire Funds Service participants that are also SWIFT members must be able to send messages that include these changes:
- Tag {8200} will be added as an optional tag in bank transfer (BTR) and cover payment (CTP COVS) messages. Please note that tag {8200} is already available in customer transfer (CTP) messages.
- The format of tag {8200} will be changed to:
- Eliminate Element 01 Addenda Length
- Increase the overall length from 8,994 to 9,000 characters
- Require the four characters <<>> to denote the end of the data in tag {8200} (these characters will not be counted toward the 9,000 character limit)
For a detailed description of the above changes and the Error Code Glossary, please refer to the Fedwire Application Interface Manual (FAIM) version 3.0.7, available on MyStandards (Off-site). The use of MyStandards is free and does not require SWIFT membership. If you have not obtained access to the Federal Reserve Banks’ private page on MyStandards, please contact your account executive.
Market Practice on Use of Tag {8200}
We collaborated with the industry to develop a market practice for how to use tag {8200} to support ISO 20022 interoperability for cross-border payments. Details about the market practice are available on MyStandards (Off-site). Additionally, we will work with the industry to develop documents to map select ISO 20022 messages to the Fedwire Funds Service bank transfer, customer transfer, and cover payments messages. The mapping documents will be published on MyStandards in Q3 2021.
Testing Availability
We plan to make these changes available for customer and software vendor testing for at least three months in the Depository Institution Testing environment in mid-2022. A separate communication will be sent in Q1 2022 to announce the testing start date.
ISO 20022 Migration
We remain committed to supporting the ISO 20022 standard and have continued an internal assessment of the revised ISO 20022 migration strategy in favor of a single-day implementation of fully enhanced ISO 20022 messages for the Fedwire Funds Service. We plan to update the industry later this year regarding the overall ISO 20022 migration plan.
For questions regarding this communication, please contact your respective Wholesale Operations Site.