SWIFT, a provider of financial messaging services, will be forming a High Value Payments taskforce, part of a global initiative to help police its payments infrastructure, including the oversight for the ISO 20022 messaging standard, per a SWIFT statement.

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High Value Payments (HVPs) form a crucial part of the broader payments realm, with a number of organizations depending on secure access to securities, money markets and payments eco-systems. In addition HVPs also allow for large value and high priority, despite lower volume, payments to be made between multiple participants with immediate settlement finality.

In a bid to help foster increased transparency in this area, SWIFT has formulated a task force designed to target this specific area of focus, which it believes is an instrumental to the ISO 20022 harmonisation initiative. More specifically, this agenda aims to address industry concerns around fragmentation and the risk of multiple versions and variants being adopted across various markets.

New Mandate

The new task force will be named HVPS+ and will aim to build on an existing HVPS market practice utilized in the interbank co-operative’s MyStandards messaging toolbox. The new group will see a broadened mandate relative to current market practices, which will ultimately aim to deliver an additional set of ISO 20022 guidelines for high value payments systems.

Other organizations will also assist in the HVPS+ taskforce, which include ABN Amro, Australian Payments Clearing Association, Banca d’Italia, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bank of England, EBA Clearing, European Central Bank, FirstRand Bank Ltd, Hong Kong Interbank Clearing Limited, Payments Canada, Société Générale, Standard Bank, and Wells Fargo.

Earlier this week, SWIFT also made headlines when it embarked on a campaign to increase the level of public awareness for ongoing security features across its interface products – the new initiative is part of SWIFT’s Customer Security Programme, which was launched to help customers undergo and implement existing security features with the hopes of fostering more secure access to the SWIFT infrastructure.