swiftML

swiftML, or the SWIFT Markup Language, is an XML vocabulary to automate "swifts."  SWIFT is an industry owned cooperative that provides messaging services to banks, broker-dealers and investment managers, as well as to market infrastructures in payments, treasury, securities and trade. SWIFT services reduce costs, manage risk, and improve automation surrounding handling of funds via inter-bank messaging. It supplies secure messaging services and interface software to over 7,000 financial institutions in 192 countries; the average daily value of payment messages on SWIFT is estimated to be above USD 5 trillion. 

According to SWIFT, "swiftML is not 'just another XML implementation for the financial industry'. The design of swiftML bears in mind the interoperability issue of different financial XML implementations through the use of SWIFTStandards Modeling. This new standardization approach allows to the separation of the business standard from its physical representation in a specific syntax (in this case XML). All this information is stored in the SWIFTStandards Repository. This allows different syntaxes (even non-XML syntaxes) to interoperate through the use of the common business model. swiftML is in line with major XML standardization initiatives (e.g., ebXML, a global initiative to achieve a common and predictable usage of XML cross-industry). swiftML adoption follows a very structured approach. For example, business information is always expressed as XML elements/values; metadata information is expressed as XML attributes. This results in consistent and uniform swiftML messages."