Case Study: EastWest Bank achieves PhilPaSS Plus ISO 20022 compliance with Bottomline's message transformation solution

Successfully migrate to PhilPaSS Plus, enabling the bank to receive and send data rich ISO 20022 messages

EastWest Bank, a major Philippine bank with more than 400 branches and strong retail lending and card businesses, faced a regulatory mandate to migrate to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ PhilPaSS Plus real‑time system using ISO 20022 by June 2021. The bank’s challenge was to meet the BSP deadline and support the new, data‑rich messaging format while minimizing changes and IT impact to its T24 core banking platform and limited support resources.

Bottomline, a long‑time SWIFT partner, implemented an automated ISO 20022 transformation and enrichment solution that converted EastWest’s existing SWIFT MT messages to MX (and back) and bridged connectivity to PhilPaSS Plus with no manual intervention and minimal T24 disruption. The project was completed ahead of the BSP deadline, enabling MX send/receive capability, richer transaction data for improved analytics, sanctions and fraud checks, reduced manual effort, freed IT resources for core projects, and an improved customer experience.

EastWest Bank

Rodel Garcia

Head of the Fund Transfer Department