ISO 20022, the ISO standard for the interchange of electronic data between financial institutions, has arrived and is shaking up the payment sector worldwide. Migrating to the new system is voluntary, but the advantages of lower cost, greater fraud protection, increased customer satisfaction are quickly winning over banks and businesses alike, making its blanket adoption inevitable. What do bank managers need to do to prepare for this payment-processing overhaul?
The London Inter-bank Offered Rate, LIBOR, has for 50 years served as one of the most widely used benchmark interest-rate indexes. But its reputation has been tarnished by concerns that it has been manipulated by banks, and the United Kingdom’s FCA has pulled the plug on LIBOR submissions after 2021. Its successors—risk-free rates—are lining up to take over, but the transition is definitely not guaranteed to be smooth.
Given the prevailing financial infrastructure that exists today, international transfers continue to remain costly, time-consuming and risky—and even more so when there is a need to exchange currency. Such transactions normally undergo a series of stages that invariably include the involvement of intermediary parties and the foreign-exchange market