ISO 20022 Migration: From Deadline Pressure to Structured Delivery
The ISO 20022 migration isn't a future problem. It's today's problem. If your payments infrastructure still treats ISO 20022 as a translation layer bolted onto legacy message formats, you're accumulating technical debt that compounds with every transaction.
I'm Abdul Baruwa, founder of kaano.io. I manage CHAPS and BACS payment operations at a UK financial institution. Not as an advisor. As the person responsible for keeping money moving — every day, across both schemes.
That's the difference between kaano.io and the large consultancies quoting you six-figure discovery phases. I don't need three months to understand your payment flows. I already live inside them.
Why ISO 20022 Migration Is Harder Than It Looks
The messaging standard itself isn't the hard part. The hard part is everything it touches.
Data Enrichment Requirements
ISO 20022 carries significantly richer data than MT messages. Structured addresses, purpose codes, LEI identifiers. Most banks' upstream systems don't capture this data today. Retrofitting data collection across origination channels is a multi-team, multi-quarter effort that nobody budgeted for.
Dual-Format Coexistence
During the transition period, you're running MT and MX in parallel. That means translation logic, reconciliation mismatches, and edge cases that only surface in production. Every translation is a potential break point.
Testing Against Live Schemes
You can't fully validate ISO 20022 compliance in a sandbox. CHAPS and Faster Payments have specific scheme rules, message validation requirements, and connectivity patterns that only show up when you're testing against the real infrastructure.
Operational Readiness
Your payments operations team needs to monitor, investigate, and repair ISO 20022 messages. That means new dashboards, new runbooks, new escalation paths. If you migrate the technology but not the operations, you've just created a more expensive way to fail.
Our Approach
No bloated methodology. No 80-slide decks that restate the problem. Three phases, each with concrete deliverables.
Phase 1: Payments Landscape Assessment (2–4 weeks)
I map your current payment flows — CHAPS, BACS, Faster Payments, SWIFT — and identify every point where ISO 20022 creates a gap. Data quality. Message routing. Reconciliation. Exception handling. You get a prioritized list of what needs to change, sized by effort and risk.
Phase 2: Migration Architecture & Roadmap (3–6 weeks)
The engineering work. I design the target-state architecture for your ISO 20022 message processing — including enrichment, validation, translation (if coexistence is required), and scheme connectivity. The roadmap sequences delivery to reduce risk and keep live payment flows stable.
Phase 3: Delivery Support & Operational Readiness (ongoing)
I embed with your engineering and operations teams during build and migration. Code reviews. Scheme testing strategy. Cutover planning. Operational monitoring design. I stay until you're running clean in production — not until a contract end date.
Who This Is For
- UK banks and building societies migrating payment schemes to ISO 20022 and running behind schedule
- Payment operations leaders who need someone who understands both the technology and the day-to-day reality of running live payment schemes
- CTOs and Heads of Engineering at mid-tier financial institutions who can't justify a Big Four engagement but need genuine payments expertise
- Fintechs and PSPs building ISO 20022-native payment processing and wanting architecture guidance from someone who operates at scheme level
What You Get
| Deliverable | Detail |
|---|---|
| Payments gap analysis | Current-state map of all payment flows with ISO 20022 readiness scoring per scheme |
| Data enrichment plan | Field-by-field analysis of what your origination channels need to capture for MX compliance |
| Migration architecture | Target-state design for message processing, validation, translation, and scheme connectivity |
| Phased delivery roadmap | Sequenced plan with dependencies, risk mitigations, and milestone criteria |
| Operational readiness pack | Monitoring dashboards spec, exception handling runbooks, and ops team training plan |
| Embedded delivery support | Hands-on engineering guidance during build, test, and cutover |
The Credential That Matters
25+ years in software engineering. Currently managing CHAPS and BACS payment operations at a UK financial institution. I've built payment processing systems, designed reconciliation engines, and operated live payment schemes through regulatory migrations.
I also architect and build technology products — including insurance platforms using CQRS, event sourcing, and .NET — so I think in systems, not just processes.
This isn't a practice area I added to a slide deck. It's what I do on Monday morning.