Standards Forum at Sibos in Vienna — 15-18 September 2008

Standardisation is about compromise and consensus. So how can standards bodies ever hope to be truly customer-centric? Come and listen to Lázaro Campos, Jamie Shay and their customers exchange views on what can be done to make a difference to our customers in the world of standardisation.

Standards must interoperate

SWIFT needs to be more open to working with, and adapting to, existing standards

Lázaro Campos, CEO, SWIFT, explained to attendees at the Standards Forum session, ‘Customers First in Standards’, that SWIFT was committed to sustaining improvement in all aspects of customers’ experience of standards. This would reflect “the process by which standards are developed, implemented and maintained, as well as working on interoperability with stand-ards developed elsewhere.”

“We have gone through two generations of technology to get to where we are in terms of standards today,” explained Linda McLaughlin-Moore, managing director, treasury services, J.P.Morgan. “We now need to determine the best ways to cre-ate standards for the next ten years,” she added.

‘80/20’ approach

Campos then led a discussion with Axelle Wurmser, head of SWIFT coordination, BNP Paribas Securities Services, Jamie Shay, head of standards, SWIFT, and McLaughlin-Moore about what this approach might entail. The discussion began by looking at ways to speed up the standards development process to make it more nimble, flexible and responsive to customer priorities. But, as an audience member highlighted, timely adoption of standards by users was at least as important in making them viable.

In that regard, as Wurmser pointed out, “there is a need to make standards cheaper and simpler to implement.” She even offered one improvement that could be made in the area of documentation of changes/new standards. This would involve documenting ‘compulsory changes’ that everyone would need to implement, separately from the large amount of very specific changes that might not be relevant to most users. The audience concurred that this simple sounding ‘80/20’ type of approach would help make their implementation easier.

Shay followed this up by outlining the work being done to establish a data dictionary that, once complete, would go a long way to reducing the complexity involved in establishing broader ‘message standards’ as well as simplifying customer understanding.

Standards interoperability

As part of changing the process, there was a general acceptance among the speak-ers that SWIFT needed to be more open to working with, and adapting to, standards that already exist and are widely used elsewhere. As McLaughlin-Moore pointed out: “SWIFT must find ways to embrace local domestic standards. Many of the standards that SWIFT has were developed in ways that did not necessarily take into account a need to interoperate with local standards, such as those that are used in China.”

Wurmser added: “Let’s not redo existing standards that already work well else-where.” An audience member suggested that in most areas SWIFT ISO 20022 should be a ‘superset’ of local standards. Given this, SWIFT could establish and ‘own’ the ‘accepted’ way to map to and from SWIFT standards to these local standards, rather than redesigning those standards. Greater interoperability would offer cheaper and quicker development of standards, make them easier to implement and lead to quicker achievement of the desired critical mass adoption rates.

The audience was experienced enough to know that while standards setting sounds simple it is far from easy. Their support for the efforts of SWIFT as well as genuine appreciation of the results achieved by Shay and her colleagues was evident in their response to Campos’s final questions. These highlighted their enthusiastic embrace of ISO standards generally and specific endorsement of SWIFT’s work in the development, implementation and guardianship of those standards for use within the global financial community.