Kenya migrates national payment system to ISO 20022
The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has migrated the Kenya Electronic Payment and Settlement System (KEPSS) to ISO 20022, an international standard for electronic data interchange.
CBK migrates KEPSS to ISO 20022
In a statement, the CBK says it predicts “significant benefits” arising from the migration, including “faster settlement times, streamlined processing and improved liquidity management”.
First introduced for financial institutions in 2004, ISO 20022 is a framework for developing messages used in various financial services with extensible markup language (XML), facilitating communication between different financial systems and institutions globally.
The CBK currently operates KEPSS as a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system, which it uses to process large-value and time-critical payments, processing approximately $305 billion in the year up to August.
Applied to the system, described as “the backbone of Kenya’s domestic and regional payment transactions”, ISO 20022 will enable the CBK to monitor fraud, facilitate cross-border payments and enhance interoperability between domestic and international payment systems more effectively.
The central bank cites the system’s migration as a “key component” of Kenya’s National Payments Strategy, which previously saw the country’s Cheque Clearing House adopt ISO 20022.
