The thing to know first
SWIFT's MT/ISO 20022 coexistence period for cross-border payments ended on 22 November 2025. Since that date ISO 20022 has been the exclusive standard for cross-border payment instructions and reporting on the SWIFT network. MT 102, MT 102 STP, MT 103 REMIT, MT 201 and MT 203 have been removed entirely.
This matters for how Meridian is positioned. A settlement codex mapped to MT is mapped to something the industry has already left, and any banker reading it will notice. Mapping to ISO 20022 is not a modernisation exercise — it is the difference between speaking the language banks use now and one they retired last year.
Sources: SWIFT ISO 20022 implementation FAQs; SWIFT “10 days to go” adoption briefing, November 2025; J.P. Morgan and ING migration guidance.
Where the industry actually is
ESTC mapped to ISO 20022
| ESTC | Purpose | Was (MT) | Now (ISO 20022) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ECH101 | Single customer credit transfer | MT 103 | pacs.008 |
| ECH102 | Multiple / batch customer transfer | MT 102 | pacs.008 (batch) |
| ECH100 | Request for transfer | MT 101 | pain.001 |
| ECH104 | Direct debit / recurring mandate | MT 104 | pain.008 |
| ECH200 | FI transfer, own account | MT 200 | pacs.009 |
| ECH201 | Cover payment | MT 202 COV | pacs.009 COV |
| ECH202 | General FI transfer | MT 202 | pacs.009 |
| ECH256 | Advice of non-payment / return | MT 296 | pacs.004 |
| ECH292 | Request for cancellation | MT 192 / 292 | camt.056 |
| ECH416 | Advice of non-acceptance | MT 296 | pacs.002 (rejected) |
| ECH900 | Confirmation of debit | MT 900 | camt.054 |
| ECH910 | Confirmation of credit | MT 910 | camt.054 |
| ECH940 | Customer statement | MT 940 | camt.053 |
| ECH941 | Balance report | MT 941 | camt.052 |
| ECH942 | Interim transaction report | MT 942 | camt.052 |
| ECH950 | Priority security protocol / freeze | MT 195 / 295 | camt.110 |
| ECH953 | Court-ordered reversal | MT 196 / 296 | camt.111 + pacs.004 |
| ECH955 | KYC/AML escalation | MT 199 | camt.110 |
| ECH734 | Advice of discrepancy | MT 734 | camt.029 |
Where ISO 20022 has no equivalent
| ESTC | Purpose | Position |
|---|---|---|
| ECH610 | Vault chain-of-custody / gold provenance | No ISO 20022 message exists. Gold provenance has never been a payment-messaging concern because no payment network anchors a unit of account to allocated metal. |
| ECHB010 / B011 | Settlement token mint and burn | No equivalent. ISO 20022 assumes value moves between accounts; it has no concept of a unit created for transit and destroyed on arrival. |
| ECHB040 | Settlement finality / atomicity proof | ISO 20022 carries status reports (pacs.002) but has no primitive asserting that partial failure was impossible. |
| ECHAAA020 | PAM lifecycle | No equivalent. A sovereign citizen fund is not a payments-messaging construct. |
| ECHAAA040/041 | Insurance premium and claim | Insurance runs on ACORD, not ISO 20022 payments messaging. Genuinely outside scope rather than missing. |
What this page is, and isn't
What's real here
The migration dates, the retired MT types and the MT-to-ISO 20022 equivalences are taken from SWIFT's own published adoption material and from J.P. Morgan and ING migration guidance, not reconstructed from memory. The end of coexistence on 22 November 2025 is a matter of public record. The mapping is a genuine design mapping: each ESTC range has been placed against the message type that actually carries that function under CBPR+, including the cases where one ESTC code maps to a pair of ISO messages.
What this is not
This is a mapping, not an implementation. Meridian does not currently emit or parse ISO 20022 XML, is not connected to SWIFT, and has no CBPR+ accreditation — that work follows authorisation and is a substantial engineering programme in its own right. Message-level mapping is also the easy half: ISO 20022's value is in structured data — party identification, structured addresses, purpose codes, remittance information — and populating those fields correctly is where real migrations consume their budget. Anyone assessing this should read it as a statement of architectural direction, not of readiness.
