The BIS Innovation Hub’s Project Keystone debuts a prototype that converts ISO 20022 messages into dashboards for intraday liquidity, network risk and macro “nowcasting,” aligned with CPMI harmonisation to make analysis comparable across jurisdictions
The Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Innovation Hub has unveiled Project Keystone, an analytical prototype built with the Bank of England which turns ISO 20022 payment messages—into ready-made dashboards for economic, financial and compliance analysis.
The design pairs a data transformation platform with pre-defined modules so payment system operators can run ad hoc analysis without lengthy custom builds.
At its core, Keystone focuses on the operational heartbeat of high-value payments. A liquidity monitoring suite tracks inflows and outflows and the maximum intraday net debit position at each participant, helping supervisors gauge whether banks are holding sufficient liquidity in periods of stress.
The toolkit also flags timing delays in payments against historical norms, an early signal of liquidity strain observed in prior research, and renders a network view showing the most active nodes and how tightly participants are interlinked, right down to measures of completeness and reciprocity that indicate resilience.
The project is explicit about the wholesale focus of the dataset and its privacy implications. Because RTGS transactions are largely between financial institutions and corporates, the prototype can restrict access to any personal data in messages while still exposing validation results and analytics outputs. That makes liquidity and macro-oriented insights feasible without breaching confidentiality.
Keystone’s economic monitoring module leans on one of ISO 20022’s most practical upgrades: purpose codes. Analysts can aggregate transaction values by purpose over time or drill into curated use cases, such as housing-related flows (loan repayments, disbursals and closures) as a proxy for housing activity.
A second view exploits the card bulk clearing purpose code used by merchant acquirers to infer card-spending trends at an aggregate level without any cardholder data. The same pipeline parses structured address fields to split domestic and cross-border volumes by country, supporting quicker reads on external flows.
A complementary fraud analytics path analyses PACS.004 return-of-funds messages tagged with fraud-related reason codes. By surfacing the senders most associated with returned payments, Keystone can help operators enrich the sample of known fraud transactions—useful training material for future machine-learning workstreams highlighted elsewhere by the Innovation Hub.
Crucially, the toolkit bakes in messaging alignment checks to advance global CPMI efforts on ISO 20022 harmonisation for cross-border payments. Messages are scored for the presence of required and recommended fields under the CPMI data model, with logs to pinpoint which elements are routinely missing. Additional validations enforce structured identifiers (BIC or LEI) for financial institutions and counterparties, consistent time-zones on dates and times, and adherence to external code sets such as purpose codes.
The aim is to make outputs comparable across jurisdictions that have implemented ISO 20022 in slightly different ways.
The launch, announced in a report on September 4, lands as adoption hits critical mass. The report notes that 78% of payment system operators have either implemented ISO 20022 or have concrete plans to do so. Keystone positions itself as a blueprint to “unlock future use cases,” reinforcing G20-backed goals to harmonise data and accelerate cross-border improvements by letting jurisdictions run similar analyses on similar data.
Under the bonnet, the prototype is configurable and open-source-based, designed to cope with varying national implementations while running on-premises or in the cloud. The architecture is intentionally simple but horizontally scalable; the BIS tested at over a million transactions per day and orchestrated using Kubernetes pods to handle higher volumes as needed.
For operators and central banks, the immediate upside is faster situational awareness: intraday liquidity pressures, operational bottlenecks and participant interdependencies can be monitored in near real time, while purpose-coded flows enable higher-frequency reads on sectors such as housing and retail spend.
The BIS also flags that RTGS and instant payment systems are complementary lenses—RTGS capturing high-value flows and IPS the lower-value retail pulse, hinting at richer analytics when datasets are combined.
