About ISO 20022

ISO 20022 is a multi part International Standard prepared by ISO Technical Committee TC68 Financial Services. It describes a common platform for the development of messages using:

• a modelling methodology (based on UML) to capture in a syntax-independent way financial business areas, business transactions and associated message flows;
• a central dictionary of business items used in financial communications;
• a set of XML design rules to convert the messages described in UML into XML schemas, whenever the use of the ISO 20022 XML-based syntax is preferred.

The resulting models and derived messages are published in the Catalogue of messages and stored in the ISO 20022 Financial Repository available on this website.

This flexible framework allows communities of users and message development organizations to define message sets according to an internationally agreed approach using internationally agreed business semantics and, whenever desirable, to migrate to the use of a common XML-based syntax.