The ISO/TC 68 "Financial Services" plenary meetings were held at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Pontificia Università della Santa Croce – PUSC) in the historic centre of Rome. Although located on Italian territory, the university enjoys an extraterritorial status under the jurisdiction of the Vatican. Numerous Delegates from all over the world attended the committee meetings and the plenary session in person.

The meetings provided an excellent opportunity for experts from around the world to discuss the future of financial services standardization, exchange knowledge, and strengthen international collaboration. From a Swiss perspective, the week was particularly significant, with two plenary sessions chaired under Swiss leadership. During the ISO 20022 Registration Management Group (RMG) meeting, Martin Walder had the honour of stepping in as Vice Convenor on behalf of the Convenor. In addition, the ISO/TC 68/SC 8 Plenary was excellently chaired by Dominique Tanner, Chair of SC 8, together with Community Manager Sandra Roth.

The hosts provided outstanding hospitality throughout the week. Despite the warm weather, participants addressed challenging topics with professionalism and composure. The programme concluded with a guided tour of the university, its basilica, and the rooftop terrace, offering impressive views across the Eternal City.
 

ISO 20022 Registration Management Group (RMG), 26 May 2026

The ISO 20022 Registration Authority (RA) reported, since April 2025 to have received and processed:

• 2 new business justifications (Securities, Regulatory)
• 2 new business justifications- API resources (Cards, Securities)
• 43 maintenance change requests documents for the yearly maintenance 2025/2026 cycle to implement all approved change requests for Payments, Securities, Derivatives regulatory reporting, FX, TSG and Cards domains.
• 6 Fast-track maintenance change requests
• 36 External Code sets change requests and
• 1 data scheme change request

As a highlight of 2026, the RA registered the first set of ISO 20022 API Resources as requested by the business justification "Account Validation API Resources", jointly submitted by the European Payments Council (EPC), the Nordic Payments Council (NPC) and Swift.

As the ISO 20022 standard has been revised towards its 2026 edition for further consistency, accuracy and interoperability, the RMG will next consult its ISO 20022 user community to implement the enhanced aspect of the new ISO 20022 edition. One typical example is the implementation aspects of Part 9 "Syntax generation rules" which allows users to develop new ISO 20022 messages or API Resources using non-XML syntax (e.g. JSON) without having to revise the standard to allow for a new syntax.

ISO/TC 68/SC 9 (Information exchange for financial services), 27 May 2026

In the first half of 2026, the ISO 20022 standard was revised and the new 2026 edition published, the first new edition since 2013. The new 2026 edition comprises a new part 9 which specifies Syntax generation requirements and rules, in the future to offer support for alternative syntaxes next to XML and ASN.1, e.g. JSON, FIX and so on. The working group (WG 4), responsible for elaborating the 2026 edition of ISO 20022, is continuing its effort to categorise and prioritise remaining requirements that may be considered for future editions of ISO 20022.

In view of the increasing impact of agentic AI in the cards domain, SC 9 resolved, in the advisory group on AI (TC 68/AG 6), to entertain discussions related to the impact of agentic AI on ISO 8583 (Financial-transaction-card-originated messages — Interchange message specifications) and ISO 20022 implementation. Amongst others, it was discussed that cards messages need a dedicated new message element to indicate whether a cards transaction was initiated by means of agentic AI or otherwise. Furthermore, it was deliberated, through what standardised approach, agentic transactions could be recognised and unambiguously defined.

In response to an earlier proposal of Switzerland, SC 9 resolved to hold a ballot regarding the withdrawal of ISO 9144:1991 (vers 6) "Securities — Optical character recognition line — Position and structure". For successive maintenance iterations, Switzerland had argued that the importance of securities issuance in physical form is reducing, hence the ISO 9144 standard has lost its relevance for securities market in Switzerland and elsewhere.

In response to an earlier comment of Switzerland, SC 9 resolved to hold a ballot to withdraw ISO 22307:2008 "Financial services – Privacy impact assessment" in favour of ISO/IEC 29134:2023 "Information technology Security techniques – Guidelines for privacy impact assessment" which is more up to date.

ISO/TC 68 (Financial services), 29 May 2026

In line with earlier requests of Switzerland, TC 68 resolved to ask TC 68/SC 8 (Reference data for financial services) to consider the withdrawal of ISO 24366 "Natural Persons Identifier (NPI)". The ISO 24366 standard had been conceived as a unique identifier for natural persons. Whilst ISO 24366 part 1 only defined the format of the NPI, ISO 24366 part 2 was intended to reflect the uniqueness of NPIs. Whereas ISO 24366 part 1 was published, ISO 24366 part 2 was discontinued. In order to avoid that NPI issuing organisations may proceed issuing NPIs that are not conformant to the uniqueness principle, the withdrawal of ISO 24366 part 1 was considered as the appropriate way forward.

In response to a suggestion of Switzerland, TC68 resolved to hold open virtual quarterly meetings with the ISO TC 68 Strategic Leadership Group where all national standards committees (NSCs) and Liaisons can participate and receive updates on progress and be able to ask questions or raise issues to the ISO TC 68 Chair, Committee Manager, and the Strategic Leadership Group (SLG) for consideration during the meetings. This approach will provide country members such as Switzerland with more direct access to the TC 68 leadership in order to provide guidance as to the strategic direction of standards development in financial services.

Once again, it has proven that this annual opportunity to meet in person, both on a professional and a personal level, was well worth the trip.