ISO 20092 - The New Financial Rails

The 22nd November 2025 was the final deadline for all the banking rails to move onto the ISO 20022 messaging system. The ISO 20022 standard completes its migration across all the banking systems. This is a major upgrade from the old, error-prone MT system used by Swift. ISO 20022 links traditional finance with blockchain technology. Up to now the banks and financial institutions have been operating in silos. Now Trade-Fi and De-Fi will be speaking the same language, making the system interoperable. ISO 20022 is not a currency, not a blockchain, and not a digital asset. ISO 20022 is a messaging standard — a universal language that defines how banks transmit payment information.

ISO 20022 directly exposes fraud. Under the old MT system and message might say: “Funds transfer. Details on file”. The messaging under ISO 20022 needs to specify the following:

• exact source of funds

• exact economic purpose

• exact ownership structure

• exact intermediary chain

• exact fees, spreads and FX rates

• exact regulatory category

• exact counter-play information

Transparency is the rule for the new day in banking. This is huge as the banking elite loves opacity and profits from secrecy. Under ISO 20022 there is a paper trail for every transaction, everything becomes auditable by anyone.

On 22nd November 2025 the following systems will complete their transition:

SWIFT

The Federal Reserve

The European Central Bank

The Bank of England

BRICS

IMF

BIS  

For the first time in history, all major financial institutions will speak the same transactional language.

These are the digital assets (protocols is actually a better description) that are ISO 20022 compliant. All with their unique, complimentary roles to play in the new financial system. For example XRP is used by institutions for payments and XLM is used by retail for payments. XDC is for business contracts. Decentralised apps (dApps) will be built on HBAR.

XRP

XLM

HBAR

ALGO

IOTA

XDC

QNT

So now we will start to see cross border payments, micro remittances, stocks, tokenised bonds and FX moving across these rails in real time.

The next phase is instant settlement. And this is where XRP comes in. The XRP Ledger (XRPL) and XRP provides the settlement layer where transactions between any currency pair or tokenised real world assets (RWA) can settle instantly. Imagine going to your local shop to buy groceries and paying with your debit card which uses Apple stock as your funding source and the transaction gets settled in the back end in real time (instantly).

This is a revolution of finance. The biggest disruption the financial world has ever faced. Bigger than the internet of information, the internet of value will change the way we use money and value in ways we can not even imagine today.

Today we are gripped in a world of unprecedented debt where even our governments are effectively bankrupt and a cost of living crisis which causes people to hoard what little money they have. Imagine a world without friction, a world where we receive instant payment for the work we do? No more waiting for our weekly or monthly salary payments. A world where we get paid by the hour, by the minute… Where the velocity of money increases a hundred fold so money flows instantly and constantly around the network. Hard to imagine in the current world but I believe we are moving to a new abundant way of living. It’s time to move beyond our old belief systems around what money is and dis-spell the man made concepts, weaponisation, fraud and frictions of money.