Ravi Sharma on UL Solutions’ Role in ISO 20022 Migration

Why It Matters

A smooth ISO 20022 migration safeguards revenue streams and regulatory compliance, giving banks and merchants a competitive edge in the evolving digital payments landscape.

Key Takeaways

• UL Solutions simplifies ISO 20022 migration across payment ecosystem
• Migration involves multiple middleware layers beyond traditional four‑corner model
• Gateways translate transaction data into banks' required message formats
• Payment networks perform validation before routing to card‑holder banks
• Efficient migration reduces transaction delays and compliance risks

Summary

The video spotlights UL Solutions’ pivotal role in guiding financial institutions through the ISO 20022 migration, a shift that reshapes how payment data is formatted and transmitted across the industry. While the traditional four‑corner model—merchant, acquiring bank, payment network, and issuer—captures the core participants, the discussion reveals a far more intricate web of middleware components that must be re‑engineered.

Ravi Sharma explains that point‑of‑sale terminals, online checkout gateways, and intermediary translators act as linguistic bridges, converting transaction messages into the specific syntax each downstream entity requires. Once a gateway hands off the data, the acquiring bank must reformat and validate it for its network, which then conducts additional checks before repackaging the information for the card‑holder’s issuing bank.

He illustrates the flow with a step‑by‑step example: a consumer’s card details travel from the merchant’s checkout to a gateway, then to the acquiring bank, onward to the payment network for compliance screening, and finally to the issuer for approval or denial. UL Solutions provides the tools and expertise to orchestrate these transformations, ensuring messages remain compliant with ISO 20022 standards throughout.

The implications are clear: institutions that leverage UL Solutions can accelerate migration timelines, minimize transaction latency, and avoid costly compliance breaches. Streamlined data conversion not only improves operational efficiency but also enhances the end‑user experience by reducing payment failures during this industry‑wide transition.

Original Description

In this segment of The Paytech Show, Ravi Sharma details how UL Solutions is supporting companies with the complex migration to the new ISO 20022 messaging standard. There are several technical functions involved between issuing and acquiring banks when transactions are being sent - to reduce the friction and chance of rejection, all players need to communicate in an agreed language so that translation isn’t necessary - this is where ISO 20022 will prove its worth.