Version 0.18 of the ISO 20022 MCP Server is live. The theme of the release is simple: an AI assistant should read the specification, not interrogate it.
Until now, much of what the server knew was reachable only through tools, each one a question with its own parameters and its own shape of answer. In this release those tools become resources: every piece of the specification has a stable address, returns JSON, and can be walked from the top, from the data dictionary or from the business process catalogue, page by page. An assistant that knows where it is can follow the links, take only what it needs, and come back to the same address tomorrow and find the same thing.
What’s new
- What a message depends on. Ask for a message and get everything underneath it, in one place. For
pain.001.001.13, the customer credit transfer initiation, that is 66 message components, 29 choice types, 80 code sets and 34 simple data types. It is the list you need before you build, validate or document the message. - Business components as tables. Pick a business component, such as an ATM total, and the server describes the relational shape: its tables, the join tables for many-to-many associations, the value tables for code sets, and suggested names that keep ISO’s generic words (Account, Party, Payment) out of the way of your own tables.
- Search and lookup. Keyword search is a resource now, and a message can be found by its identifier at any level:
pain,pain.001,pain.001.001orpain.001.001.12. - Current, provisional and needed by. Lists can be filtered to what is current, what is provisional, and what the latest messages of ISO actually need, so a dictionary of thousands of entries shrinks to the part you use.
- External code lists. Code sets that ISO publishes separately now point to their current value list, compared with the repository.
- Snapshot differences and reference data. What changed between releases of the specification, and supplementary reference documents such as bank transaction codes, are resources too, available on paid plans.
Small things that matter
- A message counts as current only if it is the highest registered version of its family.
- Members come back in the order the standard declares them, never sorted.
- Previews are capped per kind of child, and counts are the same whatever the plan.
- A bad parameter now says what was wrong, instead of failing quietly.
What went away
The tools these resources replace are removed: keyword search, the code set and simple type details, the repository statistics, the snapshot difference and the reference data tools, and the JSON conversion instructions. Each one is now a resource at an address of its own. If you built something against one of the old tool names, read the resource instead.
Where this is going
The ISO 20022 MCP Server is in private beta with select partners, and public access opens in the fourth quarter of 2026. If you would like to take part in the beta, contact us.
The ISO 20022 specification, its code sets and their text are ISO’s. ISO and its Registration Authority publish them to be used and reproduced freely under the ISO 20022 Terms of use and the Intellectual Property Rights Policy. This is not the official ISO 20022 site; the sole source of up-to-date material is https://www.iso20022.org/. ISO’s material is provided “as is”, without warranty.