ISO 15022 is anISO standard for securitiesmessaging used in transactions between financial institutions. Participants in thefinancial industry need a common representation of thefinancial transactions they perform and this standard defines general messageschema, which in turn are used by organizations to define messages in a complete and unambiguous way.[1] This results in efficiency, lower costs, and the avoidance of errors. Prior to standardization in this area, there were overlapping standards, orad hoc approaches where there was a functional gap and no standard.
ISO 15022 replaces the previous securities messaging standardISO 7775. It provides two syntaxes: one compatible with the preceding standards, and one fairly compatible withEDIFACT.ISO 20022 is the successor to ISO 15022.
SWIFT is theregistration authority for ISO 15022. In SWIFT financial messages, the standard is applied to variety ofmessage types.
ISO 15022 was developed in 1992, in London, to provide the securities industry with a better tool to create message standards. The previous standard ISO 7775 contained the actual message standards themselves (like the SWIFT message types MT 520 or MT 534), which did not make it easy to make changes to these standards (because each time one needs to pass a number of time-consuming standard cycles). To avoid this, ISO 15022 does not contain the actual messages, but contains a set of rules and guidelines to build messages. If these rules and guidelines are adhered to (checked by the registration authority) the resulting message (format) is automatically an ISO 15022-compliant standard. Examples are theMT103,MT202 Cov, MT540, MT542, MT548, etc.
ISO 15022 is split into two parts:
