Icon Solutions Transforms Bank Payments Modernisation With ISO 20022 & Real-Time Rails

At Sibos 2025, Liam Jeffs and Toine van Beusekom from Icon Solutions discuss where banks really are with ISO 20022.

Jeffs says many institutions defaulted to tactical fixes because of competing priorities, other regulations and the high cost of change while different interpretations of ISO have also made bank-to-bank testing hard. Meanwhile, corporates haven’t consistently pushed for value-added services that use richer ISO data and even so, real-time payment schemes running on ISO rails are nudging the market toward broader adoption.

van Beusekom points out that volumes are climbing fast, meaning that if a bank only wrapped “mappers” around legacy cores without modernising the engines, rising traffic will expose bottlenecks. He recommends designing for 10–30x today’s throughput and making operations truly real time. A practical move is to decouple the value chain, separating order management (where smart routing sits), execution, and clearing & settlement, so new payment types can be added quickly without end-to-end rebuilds.

Funding dynamics are shifting too as for years, citing an ISO deadline was enough to unlock budget. van Beusekom now argues that’s ending: spend now has to be justified with clear business cases, new revenue, lower cost-to-serve, and tangible client value. Meanwhile, regulatory focus is moving from ISO compliance to operational resilience after several public outages in the UK, putting capacity, failover and recovery under the microscope.

Success comes from tight alignment between business and tech and Jeffs stresses a clear payments strategy, shared across product and IT, anchored by a target architecture. In practice, that means modern stacks and microservices to deliver reliably, at scale, with the flexibility to adapt.

Change doesn’t have to be a big-bang event. With digital currencies on the agenda and real-time rails expanding, Jeffs suggests steady, low-risk transformation beats disruptive overhauls and notes that clients using Icon’s IPF (Icon Payments Framework) have shipped faster and cheaper and, importantly, built confidence to keep moving forward.