The problem we are working on
The Registration Authority publishes ISO 20022 free of charge, and anybody can download the schemas. That is genuinely open, and it is not remotely the same thing as being usable.
What the standard does not tell you is whether a particular message will be accepted. That answer lives above the schema, in market practice guidelines and scheme rulebooks, and in the accumulated experience of people who have watched payments fail and worked out why. Institutions large enough to employ those specialists are adequately covered. Everybody else purchases the answer, or guesses.
That particular gap is what this project exists to close.
Our mission
To make correctness in ISO 20022 checkable by anyone, without a licence, a portal, or a support contract.
Concretely, that means three commitments. Every verdict cites the rule that produced it, so it can be verified rather than believed. Every check executes on the user's own machine, so using it costs nothing and reveals nothing. And where correctness cannot be established, the tool says so instead of guessing.
What we are working towards
Nobody rejected for a reason they could have known. The November 2026 address mandate will reject payments that a five-second check would have caught. The tooling required to prevent that should not be something an institution must procure.
Diagnostics a non-specialist can act on. A finding naming a rule, a field and a correction can be handed directly to whoever owns the data. A finding saying merely "invalid" requires a specialist, and specialists are the scarce resource.
Verification anyone can repeat. Every claim on this site names the command that reproduces it. A validator asking to be trusted has misunderstood what it is for.
A tool that ages well. ISO 20022 publishes new versions continually and the scheme rules change around it. Being derived from the standard rather than from a snapshot of it is what keeps this useful in five years.
How we will know
By whether payments stop failing for avoidable reasons, which is not something this project can measure directly. The proxies therefore matter.
Whether an institution can answer "will this be accepted" without buying anything. Whether a finding gets acted on without being escalated. Whether the published conformance figures still reproduce. And whether anyone has been misled by a confident wrong answer — the failure that would matter more than any of the others.
What would make us wrong
If the market solves this properly, this project should become unnecessary. Better tooling from the Registration Authority, or scheme rules published in machine-readable form, would eliminate most of the justification for AskISO existing.
That would be a good outcome. A project that would rather remain necessary than see the problem solved has started optimising for itself.
Where to go next
About us covers who maintains this and how it is funded. Innovation covers what is built, what is next, and what will deliberately never be built.