Karla McKenna has been named head of standards at the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation on a year’s secondment from Citi, where she is director of market practice and standards.
Whatever label you use, instant, immediate, faster or real-time payments have moved to the top of the agenda at every payments-related event so far this year and are sure to be high on the agenda when Swift’s annual Sibos event lands in Singapore in October. Nearing the halfway mark for 2015, here’s a roundup of the stories so far …
The window of opportunity to harmonise international real-time payments implementations is rapidly closing as plans for domestic systems move ahead according to panellists at the EBAday conference this week.
Global interoperability of real-time payments systems will require harmonisation of market practices and standards. A group of international clearing houses, banks, vendors, payments associations and other parties have proposed setting up an activity to look at how to deliver this under the aegis of the International Standards Organisation – and set an ambitious target of collating an initial variant of ISO 20022 usage guidelines for real-time payments before the summer.
Financial messaging and data integration specialist Volante Technologies has taken a step into the world of packaged products with the launch of VolPay Foundation, a development platform “designed to ease the challenges of payment integration and payment processing projects”.
The Banking Industry Architecture Network has announced six new members including ACI Worldwide, Atos, EY and Zafin. Its global network now numbers 58 banks, service providers, software vendors and academic partners.
As international regulators demand more detail from banks on payments to individuals and companies, the first order of business is to ensure compliance with mandates. Migrating Swift MT payment formats to ISO 20022 will allow the industry to shape the transformation of payment messaging standards rather than have others shape it – but there is a need to set timelines for implementation or cede control.
Financial market regulations across the globe are increasingly focusing on risk management. This includes ensuring it is clear who firms are trading with and for, and confirming that firms can identify the instruments being traded. As a result, the field of reference data is increasingly held under the regulatory microscope and that lens extends to the standards used to identify financial instruments, writes Chris Pickles.
Fewer than a third of banks are at the implementation stage of projects implementing the Basel intraday liquidity monitoring rules that come into force next month – and most believe that industry collaboration will be needed to achieve a successful outcome.
FIX Trading Community has combined all its high performance trading and market data initiatives into a single working group, emphasising the importance that high performance has in the FIX family of standards. The next generation of the FIX Protocol will fully support high performance on all levels (application, presentation, session) to offer an open standard that can replace today’s proprietary interfaces for high performance trading and market data.
Banks can reduce the headaches associated with cost pressure, tough new regulation, legacy business complexity and changing customer demands by outsourcing non-core areas of business. That is the idea behind two new corporate actions products launched by financial technology vendor SunGard.
The original concept of the ISO 20022 was to create a repository of data used in financial messaging to communicate business information of any type – and to be able to add any types of data that might arise in the future. There has been a lot of focus on the use of the standard in payments and securities messaging roles, this has obscured its current and potential use in other areas.
As delegates finalise their plans to attend Sibos in Boston this month, Chris Church, chief executive Americas and global head of securities at Swift, discusses what they can expect
Capital markets participants may be able to achieve significant cost savings by making greater use of the FIX Protocol, according to a new study by post-trade specialists Alpha Omega Financial Systems.
An question that continues to be asked is will the increased adoption of ISO 20022 facilitate the consolidation of payments clearing utilities and see the introduction of new services for customers? This suggests that despite the fact that ISO 20022 has been around for more than decade, confusion still exists over what it is.
BIAN – the Bank Industry Architecture Network – has made further progress in its efforts to promote banking system standards internationally with the US First Niagara Bank and Computer Sciences Corporation and Japan’s Nomura joining as members.
New regulations requiring financial institutions to increase the amount of data fields they have on their customer records and swingeing fines imposed when processes and data are found to be inadequate have triggered an increased focus on data governance.
Global standards and approaches to regulation need to focus more on removing risk from the financial system rather than on compliance – but to do so international regulators will need to harmonise their efforts and embrace technology to a much greater degree.
Swift has announced the availability of a cloud-based application designed to eases the client onboarding process between financial institutions and their clients. First outlined at the Sibos 2012 event in Osaka, the MyStandards Readiness Portal, is backed by some big names in the business – HSBC, Citi and Clearstream spoke at a Standards Forum session […]
The financial services sector may be heavily regulated, but it is poorly standardised. A British Standards Institute-led initiative to drive more adoption of voluntary standards could reap considerable benefits for the industry.
Financial information services company Markit is aiming to create the largest financial markets messaging community and remove barriers to cross-market communication through its open messaging initiative and supporting technology, Markit Collaboration Services.
Whether or not the coalition government succeeds in implementing all of its proposals remain to be seen but undoubtedly the transformation of the banking sector – across all levels – is most certainly underway …
Predicting the future is never easy, but trying to anticipate likely developments in a particular area is essential in order to take timely action. With that caveat, Stephen Lindsay, head of standards at SWIFT, sets a boundary on a discussion on the Future of Standards: “What we are trying to do is extrapolate a little bit from where we are now to where we might be in a few years’ time,” he says.
ISO 20022 has been hailed as the lingua franca in payments and securities for some years now. It offers great potential for re-engineering the payments industry, and for process improvement, but for a standard that promises so much it is still relatively unknown.
It’s not proving easy, but progress is being made on the road to the development of a global Legal Entity Identifier that works and makes business sense.
As delegates gather for the third Business Forum organised by Swift in London this week, issues on the global impact of regulation and the banking industry’s response to it are more pressing than ever Perhaps equally pertinent to the conference – the largest event Swift organises aside from the annual Sibos conference and exhibition, with […]
Swift and the Banking Commission of the International Chamber of Commerce have introduced new legal and technology standards for the new Bank Payment Obligation payment instrument. The BPO allows buyers and suppliers to secure and finance international trade transactions. It provides the benefits of a letter of credit in an automated and secured environment, and […]
Enterprise data management vendor GoldenSource has added support for the ISO 17442 Legal Entity Identifier standard to its systems
While changes to the OTC derivatives world grab the headlines, trading is moving to a cross asset world, largely driven by regulation and standardisation – and after a few years of pain, firms may find that they are better off as a result.
The International Standards Organisation has finalised details of a new ISO standard that guarantee the long-term authenticity of electronic signatures.
US post-trade services utility the DTCC has begun client testing ISO 20022 messages for corporate actions covering distribution events.
High frequency trading specialist Rapid Addition has partnered with IBM to provide an ultra-low latency service for financial firms that are very sensitive to speed.
As the global method of identifying entities and their ownership structures, the Legal Entity Identifier forms a central part of the G20’s crisis-prevention toolbox. After a few chaotic years of LEI debate and design, regulators are finally nearing the long anticipated starting line for use of the world’s first singular identifier.
Regulatory data collection tools have been refined, standardised identifiers nearly constructed and more frequent and granular reporting rolled into regulation. Now that regulators have this mass of data, what is the next step in linking it and putting it to use?
The Enterprise Data Management Council has appointed Dennis Wisnosky to lead the implementation process for its Financial Industry Business Ontology – FIBO – suite of standards. Wisnosky is a veteran of the data management world, having previously acted as the chief technology officer and chief architect in the US Department of Defense Business Mission Area, […]
UK retail banks could be forced to share branch premises with rivals under plans to increase competition in the market, according to the chief executive of the UK’s Office of Fair Trading, Clive Maxwell.
