The National Bank has postponed the transition to a new generation of EPS based on the ISO 20022 international standard in order to give system participants more time to finalize their automated systems and rebuild business processes until April 1, 2023, the NBU press service reports .
The transition of Ukraine’s payment infrastructure to theISO 20022 international standard has been ongoing since 2016 – on May 23, 2016, the National Bank signed the ISO 20022 Harmonization Charter. The main goal is to harmonize the Ukrainian payment space with the world. Additionally, this is also a requirement of a business that needs to fill payments with additional information, increase the efficiency of their processing and digitalize payments. Before the war, the regulator planned that the new standard would start working from August 20, 2022, but now the transition has been postponed until April 1, 2023. Such norms are contained in the Resolution of the Board of the NBU dated August 15, 2022 No. 180 “On Amendments to the Resolution of the Board of the National Bank of Ukraine dated September 16, 2021 No. 93”.
“Given the objective reasons and the effect of martial law, the National Bank is postponing the transition to a new generation of EPS in order to give system participants more time to finalize their automated systems and rebuild business processes. The new generation of EPS will provide banks and businesses with new opportunities, further enhance the security of payments and increase competition in the payment market”,
Alexey Shaban,
noted the Deputy Chairman of the National Bank
The transition to ISO 20022 along with the introduction of IBAN (recall, they switched to IBAN in 2019 ) create a technological basis for Ukraine’s accession to the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and the implementation of the A2A instant payment service in Ukraine. If everything goes according to plan, then from April 1, 2023, all interbank payment transactions will take place exclusively through the new generation of EPS.
The international standard ISO 20022 is a universal way of interaction between various automated systems of participants in financial and trading markets in the world. It is the basis for the functioning of European payment systems. Among the key advantages of ISO 20022 are the highest degree of automation of payments and, accordingly, a decrease in the time for their execution, the emergence and maintenance of new players in the payment market and payment instruments in accordance with the second EU payment directive PSD2 , increasing the level of service, efficiency and transparency of payments, expanding payment details through the addition of the required additional information and strengthening the protection of information.
All documentation on the implementation of the ISO 20022 standard in Ukraine is collected on the NBU website .
