Authored by Ian Stirling, CEO, Streets Consulting
At Sibos, a deliberately adversarial debate asked whether securities markets should follow payments and fully migrate from ISO 15022 to ISO 20022. The format forced both sides to make the strongest possible case, but the direction of travel was difficult to miss: the industry increasingly sees ISO 20022 as the future standard. The real debate is less about if securities migrate, and more about when, how and at what pace.
Securities firms are already managing significant competing demands: cyber resilience, sanctions, T+1, 24/7 markets, digital assets, tokenization and broader technology transformation. The counter-argument was therefore not that ISO 20022 lacks value, but whether a wholesale migration should outrank those investments today.
Yet coexistence brings its own complexity. Maintaining two standards means duplicated maintenance, translation and market-practice challenges, while ISO 20022 provides a richer data model capable of supporting more structured information and the requirements emerging around digital assets.
Sitting there listening to the arguments, I kept coming back to a more practical question: where does standardisation actually sit on the priority list? Tokenization and real-world assets are moving quickly, firms are under pressure to get new products and services right, and budgets and talent are already stretched. So how much investment should go into normalising the rails underneath all of that?
My sense is that it cannot keep being pushed down the list. If cash, securities and digital assets are increasingly going to meet in the same ecosystem, a common language and data model starts to look less like technical housekeeping and more like a prerequisite.
The strongest conclusion was therefore pragmatic rather than ideological: establish ISO 20022 as the destination, but make the sunset of ISO 15022 flexible enough to reflect different levels of readiness. One proposal was to set a future date after which ISO 15022 would effectively stop evolving, while allowing firms sufficient time to migrate rather than imposing another disruptive “Big Bang”.
Even the more cautious voices ultimately described ISO 20022 as a future goal, with the key conditions being better data, broader consultation and avoiding a world of competing local versions of the same standard.
My takeaway from Sibos is that the argument is moving on. It is becoming less about whether securities should move to ISO 20022, and more about where standardisation sits against everything else competing for investment: tokenization, resilience, macro pressure, technology spend and talent.
And that cannot be a conversation for standards teams alone. The teams (and fintechs) building and running the stack, the people responsible for reporting, risk and internal controls, and the institutions shaping products all need to be in the room. Because ultimately, these investment decisions should come back to a fairly simple question: does this make the market work better for the client?
The direction of travel feels pretty clear. This is increasingly a question of when, not if. The sunset still needs to be defined, but it will likely look more like a dimmer switch than a light switch, with a clear end state and enough flexibility for different parts of the market to get there at different speeds.
