- Running both ISO 15022 and ISO 20022 forces firms to maintain duplicate systems, expertise, and infrastructure, creating unnecessary costs across the securities industry.
- The burden of coexistence falls most heavily on operational teams and mid-sized firms, while larger institutions are better able to absorb the expense.
- As securities data and corporate actions become more complex, ISO 15022 increasingly requires workarounds and manual processes.
It depends what hat you wear.
As a vendor, supporting both ISO 15022 and ISO 20022 is just part of the business. Clients need both, so you build for both, you maintain both, and yes, you can charge for both. That’s the reality of the current environment, and from a pure business standpoint, there’s no urgent reason to change it.
But take off the vendor hat for a moment and replace it with the community hat. Suddenly, the picture looks very different.
It begs the question: Why are firms in the industry being put through the expenses of supporting two models?
The problem playing out in real life
Here’s a scenario that happens every day. One counterparty can only receive ISO 15022 messages. Another can only take ISO 20022. And you’re a provider, sitting in the middle, serving both of them. What happens? You have to support both standards. You have no choice.
That’s not a peripheral case. It’s the norm right now in securities. And it’s creating more expenses across the market than what’s necessary.
The payments world figured this out. They migrated to ISO 20022. Done. But securities companies are still running these two standards side by side, and the firms caught in the middle keep writing checks for duplicate infrastructure, duplicate maintenance, duplicate expertise. Real money is walking out the door for no good reason.
“The market dictates” – but does it?
Talk to some folks in the industry about this, and they’ll tell you the market dictates what’s going forward. That’s been the response for years.
But there is a problem with that framing.
When people say “the market will decide,” what they usually mean is that the big global institutions will decide. And those institutions have the resources to absorb the cost of running dual systems indefinitely. For them, coexistence is manageable. It’s a line item, not a crisis.
But the people making governance decisions aren’t always the ones running operations. They’re not the ones dealing with two sets of message formats day in and day out. So when they hear “the market will decide,” they shrug and move on. Meanwhile, the market isn’t deciding: the market is stuck.
The cost of coexistence falls hardest on operational teams and mid-tier firms – the people who don’t necessarily have the loudest voice when industry governance decisions get made. That’s the disconnect that needs to be talked about.
Approaching the tipping point
Corporate actions – events that materially impact securities, such as stock splits and dividends – are where this becomes particularly visible.
Sitting in working group meetings, it’s apparent that data requirements are growing more complicated every year. New event types that nobody anticipated five years ago are emerging. Regulators want more detail in reporting. Issuers are operating their securities in ways that don’t fit neatly into the old message formats.
In a world of coexistence, new requirements technically go into both standards, but that doesn’t mean they work the same way. ISO 20022 was built to handle richer data and more complex event structures. ISO 15022, on the other hand, wasn’t.
So, firms still running 15022 end up doing workarounds, manual enrichment, and extra steps just to get to the same place. That adds up. What sounds like a standards debate in a conference room is actually extra work for the operations teams trying to get events handled properly and on time.
At some point, 15022 stops being just inconvenient. It becomes a real operational problem. And that’s when the phone calls start going up the chain. That’s when migration stops being a ‘someday’ project and becomes a ‘we need this now’ conversation.
—
The industry always finds reasons to wait: the timing isn’t right, the business case isn’t clear enough, or someone important isn’t ready yet.
Meanwhile, the bills keep coming. Every month, firms write checks for 15022 maintenance. Every quarter, technology teams split their time between two systems instead of focusing on one. Every year, the same working groups have the same conversations about the same coexistence problem.
The math hasn’t changed: two standards cost more than one. And the longer that coexistence is treated as permanent, the longer that the industry allows a tax that doesn’t need to exist.
