In less than one month, Federal Reserve Financial Services (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, such as Office of Foreign Assets Control (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.
Please contact us, your relationship manager or Wholesale Testing Services with any questions you have about 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.
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.
