With the recent launch of our ISO 20022 Maturity Model (built with insights and help from our partner KPMG), I sat down with José Luis Melgarejo Frutos, product manager for Volante’s ISO 20022 Service and the head of Volante’s Platform business unit, Nihit Ahuja, to discuss the reason for the service and the insights they’ve gleaned from existing users. I took their joint responses and for simplicity provided one combined response.
What compelled Volante to create our ISO Service?
As most of us know, the ISO 20022 standard is more of a template rather than a standard, with varied implementations across schemes and regions. With the amount of variation that exists in this space, we wanted to provide an easy way to our clients to implement this standard and to create value-added solutions for their clients / markets. We embarked on this journey to both work with the varied implementations as well as to ensure that our clients gain value from the added data included in the new message format.
By having components like messaging standards readily available in our offering, our users do not have to spend time on non-differentiated activities. They can focus on reaping benefits from the richness of the data provided in the message with new offerings for customers, additional business insights, etc.
What are you hearing from customers that are using it?
With the growing number of schemes moving to ISO 20022 in the payments space, everyone is still in the ‘meet the mandate’ phase where they are subscribing to the standards imposed by the regulators. Many of our users fit this description as well. And for them, the ability to quickly adopt and enable a posture that allows them to meet this mandate in the short-term, is quite important. While it is still early days for the monetization of ISO 20022, our clients are also beginning the brainstorming process to find ways they can make the most of the added data. We, in turn, are working to enable that ease of access to the data held within the new ISO 20022 messages.
How is our ISO Service currently being used within environments?
Some of our clients used our financial message creation or transformation APIs (from the ISO 20022 Service) within their solutions to help them meet the mandate. But the key question for many is, what about day 2 – once we can send and receive ISO messages, how do we make the most of this? Obviously, the ISO Service first and foremost helps with the need to send and receive ISO 20022-based messages, but after that basic element is met, clients start looking at using our low-code platform to monetize the data they get in these richer message formats.
Looking into the future, what do you think the longer path toward being ISO 20022-native looks like?
Fast forward a few years, and the expectation is that most of the market infrastructure will be based on the ISO 20022 message format. There will be broader adoption of ISO 20022 in other areas too like cards, securities, capital market, insurance, etc., and ISO 20022 will become the default language for information exchange. By having the ISO 20022 structure as the underlying data fabric, rich information will be carried across various bank offerings, giving banks limitless opportunities to monetize and hyper-personalize their offerings.
Is there a path we in Volante can provide to taking banks from simply compliant to native on ISO 20022 messages?
The short answer is, yes. The longer, more detailed answer is we enable our clients to implement a generic ISO 20022 standard within their organization, so they don’t have to worry about scheme specific compliance. This allows them to have compatibility across schemes and regions. In other words, it’s the easy button to meeting mandates across the globe.
But, of course, that is only part of the path toward being native. It’s an important start, but the real value comes in the later stages. This is where our clients can use our low-code platform to monetize the rich data in a way that works within their organization and for their customers.
Click here to learn more about our ISO 20022 service.
