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ISO 20022 CGI format for global payments

Advantages of ISO 20022 CGI – Why it makes sense to go beyond SEPA
The mandatory SEPA regulations as determined by the European Payments Council and the European Parliament are a key driver for further harmonisation of payment formats on the basis of ISO 20022. There are, however,a number of issues with SEPA that may incite a great number of companies to go a step further and chose ISO20022 CGI for all their SEPA and their global, non-SEPA payments.
To start with, SEPA provides harmonised formats for payments and collections. Reporting, though, is not covered by the regulation so that companies will still have to maintain different systems for their reporting and cash management. ISO 20022 CGI, on the other hand, does provide standardised XML formats also for reporting – in form of camt (Cash Management)-messages (e.g. camt.052, camt.053, camt.054) – so that companies can streamline not only their payment processes with ISO 20022 CGI but also their overall cash management.
Many different initiatives for ISO 20022 formats SEPA XML formats as determined by the EPC Local variants of the SEPA standard Bank-specific variants of ISO 20022 ISO 20022 CGI – one global standard format of ISO 20022
As a consequence, companies can eliminate the number of formats and achieve a faster and more reliable
overview of the group-wide cash situation.
A second point is that despite all harmonisation efforts, SEPA still allows local flavours to its standards. This is reflected in the messages where a component describes the different local variants. For example, for Germany the local variant of a credit transfer message is as follows: pain.001.002.03. That means that wherever such local variants exist for the different SEPA member countries they have to be taken into account when processing a payment. Moreover, the format, for example for the German local variant, only covers customer accounts in Germany. With ISO 20022 CGI, however, companies can cover customer accounts in all SEPA member countries.
Thirdly, ISO 20022 CGI pursues the concept of “data overpopulation” which further simplifies the processing of payments. In practice, this means that customers can provide all their information to the bank. The bank, if part of ISO 20022 CGI, will ensure that only the data is passed on to the receiving bank that is locally required. All other information that may be redundant at the receiving end will simply be neglected. For the customers, this is a very effective and straight-forward approach that helps companies save time and costs due to the reduced maintenance. It also enables customers to easily switch between banks that are part of ISO 20022 CGI which is an important advantage in terms of risk management. By allowing “data overpopulation” customers will no longer need to follow the EPC-recommended customer-to-bank implementation guidelines that would require them to only send the information as defined in the guidelines. With ISO 20022 CGI they can do without the filtering and elimination of redundant information.
Last but not least, one of the greatest advantages of ISO 20022 CGI is in the world-wide coverage of payments and the end-to-end processing for global payments, not only in Europe.
Most major cash management banks already support ISO 20022 CGI, and with growing customer demand the
number of banks participating in ISO 20022 CGI is expected to rise in the near future so that more customers
can benefit from the global XML standard.