SWIFT has warned securities firms that fail to comply with ISO 15022 by its target date of 1 May for migration to the new standard face the prospect of hefty charges for continuing to send ISO 7775 messages. The fines will range from Euros 10,000 to over Euros 45,000 depending on the global pricing tier of the customer in question.
“Our migration team has been pro-actively monitoring and contacting those institutions that are at risk of incurring MUG charges,” says Charles Welham, the SWIFT executive responsible for the ISO 15022 migration programme. “As we enter the last lap, we are continuing our efforts to support those customers still completing the transition to ISO 15022 and to help them reach 100 percent compliance.”
The problem is not a large one. SWIFT says that 99.5 per cent of all securities message traffic it handles is now compliant with the ISO 15022 standard. Which is just as well, since there is only six weeks remaining before the ISO 7775 Message User Group (MUG) is discontinued on 1 May, and SWIFT has set itself an ISO 15022 compliance threshold of 100 per cent by that date.
“We have received very positive feedback from the community about the benefits of ISO 15022,” says Francis Remacle, Head of the Securities Industry, at SWIFT. “Significant gains in STP, resulting in real cost savings, are already being realised by many of our customers and with the migration now coming to an end, we expect to see those benefits increase for the industry as a whole.”