End-to-End Payments Processing Through Harmonised Standardization

»Stig Korsgaard, »Danish Bankers Association

»Frank Vandamme, »SWIFT

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Abstract

Standards can only be successful if their development is done in close collaboration with the ultimate users. This implies that the financial industry must be heavily involved in the definition, prioritisation and development of standards for the various domains in finance, such as payments, securities, treasury, trade finance, etc.

Today, this condition is usually met in each individual standards development project, but there is no guarantee that the individual projects have the support of the entire financial industry. The underlying problem is the fact that the financial industry has no single and consistent representation across all organisations that are active in the development of their standards.

UN/CEFACT, ISO and SWIFT are three organisations that play a major role in the financial industry. In ISO the financial industry is represented by a technical committee, TC68, and this group is mainly active in securities and cards. In UN/CEFACT the financial industry is represented by TBG5, which is mainly active in the payments area. SWIFT has been created by a part of the financial industry to focus mainly on international, cross-border standards. Apart from these three organisations, there are still other organisations that are active regionally (such as ANSI, ECBS and EPC) and/or in a particular domain of the financial industry (such as FpML, IFX, FIX).

This "scattering" of the financial industry across multiple organisations sometimes leads to conflicts in prioritisation, duplication of efforts and inconsistency across developed standards.

UN/CEFACT, ISO and SWIFT have started detailed discussions to agree on one single harmonised process to conduct all standards development work in the financial industry. This harmonised process must be based on a correct representation of all relevant parts of the financial industry. Once established, it will provide the financial industry with a single entry point in the standards development work of the three organisations. Where necessary the agreement can be extended to other organisations, and the fact that a significant number of these organisations already have a liaison with UN/CEFACT, ISO and/or SWIFT will help to reach this objective.

This presentation will describe the current status of this harmonisation work and will also provide a concrete example based on activities in the payments domain.

Keywords

»End-to-end Payments, »Financial Industry, »Harmonised Process For Standards Development, »Standards Convergence, »XML.

The full paper was not available at the time the proceedings were created. Please check the conference web site, http://www.xmleurope.com, to find an updated version of this paper.

Biography

»Stig Korsgaard

»Danish Bankers Association

»Copenhagen, Denmark

»Denmark

Email: stk@finansraadet.dk

Stig is standardisation coordinator and head of the standards department at the Danish Bankers Association. His main responsibilities are to represent the Danish Banks in all national and international standards efforts related to the Danish banks use of electronic financial messages and to manage the development and implementation of these standards for the Danish Banks. In UN/CEFACT, he is Vice-Chair of TBG5 Finance, Chair of the TBG Mandate, Operation and Procedures Group, Vice Chair of TBG 17 Harmonisation, member of the TBG Steering Committee, member of the TMG Core Components Working Group and the ATG Group. He has been a member of the Core Components work in ebXML and eBTWG throughout their duration. He is also member of OASIS UBL TC and a number of SWIFT standards projects. Stig has a Master Degree in engineering and joined the Bankers Association in 1999.

»Frank Vandamme

»SWIFT

»La Hulpe

»Belgium

Email: frank.vandamme@swift.com

Frank is a senior technical advisor in the standards department at SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. His main responsibilities are the technical aspects of the development and implementation of standards in the financial industry. He is a member of Working Group 10 in TC68, the technical committee in ISO that deals with the financial industry. Working Group 10 is defining an XML-aware approach for the development of standardised messages in the financial industry. In CEFACT, Frank is the head of delegation for SWIFT and he is also a member of the Techniques and Methodologies Group and of the Applied Technologies Group, where he's mainly active in the areas of Core Components, repositories and XML. Frank has an IT background and had joined SWIFT in 1995.