The Japanese Bankers Association (JBA) operates the Foreign Exchange Yen Clearing System (FXYCS) to centrally process the foreign exchange yen clearing between banks when overseas companies or individuals have requested yen-denominated fund transfers to Japan or when foreign exchange transactions have taken place between banks.
In FXYCS, the Bank of Japan Financial Network System (BOJ-NET) that complies with ISO20022 Version3 is primarily used to send and receive messages related to fund transfer requests and other instructions. On the other hand, many financial institutions use SWIFT to process requests by overseas companies or individuals to transfer yen-denominated funds, and the main format of SWIFT messages is a fixed-length Message Type (MT).
As illustrated in the diagram below, in FXYCS, necessary processing has been conducted by transferring and sending and receiving fund transfer requests and other instructions via SWIFT (MT) to/from the BOJ-NET.
However, SWIFT has announced that it will start migration to ISO 20022 Version8 that utilizes the Extensible Markup Language (XML) from March 20, 2023 as its message format, in addition to existing MT.
In response to this, we hereby would like to inform that, in FXYCS, ISO 20022 Version8 SWIFT messages will be transferred to ISO20022 Version3 format by operating banks and send the BOJ-NET which utilizes ISO20022 Version3 from March 20, 2023 to conduct necessary processing (e.g. sending and receiving messages).
