Payments & settlement
Cross-border, cross-rail or cross-scheme payments where one side is ISO-20022-native and the other relies on institution-specific formats or JSON-based APIs.
Pillar • Finance & Economy
← Back to domains & pillarsFinance & Economy at the message layer.
Interlayer focuses on the messages that move between financial institutions, market infrastructures and public-finance systems — not on balances, ledgers or policy decisions. The objective is to keep settlement, reporting and public-finance signals aligned across systems without creating a new platform owner.
Core questions
How do payment, settlement and reporting messages remain interoperable across formats, institutions and jurisdictions while auditability is preserved?
Interlayer’s role
Interpret, translate and align messages between existing systems — keeping custody and decision-making with regulated institutions and infrastructures.
Constraints
Non-custodial, sovereign-neutral and audit-aligned. No central ledger, no new store of record, no authority over approvals or risk appetite.
Where interoperability questions appear
Payments, settlement and public finance signals between systems.
Finance & Economy interoperability is rarely about creating a new platform. It is about ensuring that existing systems — bank cores, payment rails, RTGS and public-finance platforms — can understand each other’s messages under their current oversight.
Reporting & supervision
Regulatory, supervisory and internal reporting messages that must reconcile across multiple systems and jurisdictions without duplicating systems of record.
Public finance & programmes
Flows between treasuries, social programmes and financial institutions where funding and outcome reporting must align, but data and authority cannot be centralised into a new actor.
Message flows
Example flows the translator can support.
These are indicative patterns only. In each case, Interlayer remains focused on message interpretation and translation — not on holding balances or directing funds.
Flow 1
Cross-rail payment instruction- 1. A bank’s core system emits a payment instruction in its internal format.
- 2. The instruction is mapped into an ISO-20022 message for a target infrastructure.
- 3. Interlayer’s translator interprets the internal message and produces the aligned ISO-20022 output.
- 4. Status and confirmation messages are translated back into the bank’s internal format.
- 5. Balances, risk decisions and ledgers remain entirely within the bank and the infrastructure.
Flow 2
Public finance reporting alignment- 1. A treasury system produces periodic reporting in a structured but non-standard JSON format.
- 2. Oversight bodies require information expressed in ISO-20022-aligned semantics.
- 3. The translator interprets the treasury JSON messages against the agreed schema.
- 4. Aligned outputs are produced for the oversight systems, without copying underlying ledgers.
- 5. Assumptions, mappings and controls are documented for audit teams on both sides.
Flow 3
Programme disbursement and reconciliation- 1. A public-interest programme triggers disbursement batches to multiple financial institutions.
- 2. Each institution has its own batch-intake and reconciliation message formats.
- 3. Interlayer’s translator defines a shared, neutral message view understood by all participants.
- 4. Disbursement instructions and reconciliation signals are translated between this view and each institution’s format.
- 5. Programme governance, funding decisions and participant records remain with the programme and institutions, not with Interlayer.
Translator role
Interpret · Translate · Align — without new custody.
The same translator concepts used elsewhere are applied within Finance & Economy, but with a higher emphasis on regulatory expectations, risk management and audit trails.
Interpret
Understand the structure and intent of existing ISO-20022 messages, proprietary bank formats and JSON APIs — including which elements are binding for risk, settlement and reporting.
Translate
Define explicit mappings between institutional formats and target structures (ISO-20022, JSON-20022, canonical views), with validation points that can be surfaced to oversight teams.
Align
Help counterparties maintain consistent interpretations of core fields and states across their systems, so that reconciliation and supervision become less fragile.
Assurance & governance
Finance & Economy work is designed to be understood by risk, audit, compliance and supervisory teams. Translator logic, assumptions and constraints can be documented in a way that fits existing three-lines-of-defence models rather than bypassing them.
- • Clear separation between message translation and business or credit decisions.
- • Documented mappings and validation rules that can be reviewed by internal or external audit.
- • Options for institutions to host translator components inside their own environments.
- • No requirement to centralise risk data, customer information or ledgers with Interlayer.
Typical starting points
- • Cross-border payment or settlement workstreams exploring ISO-20022 and JSON APIs.
- • Treasury or public-finance reporting that needs alignment without platform consolidation.
- • Early-stage interoperability labs run by central banks, market infrastructures or consortia.
Next step
Explore a Finance & Economy translator path under your existing governance.
If you are examining cross-rail payments, settlement, reporting or public finance interoperability, we can help define a message-layer translator that preserves your institutional boundaries.