I spent Monday and Tuesday at the first meeting (in London) of Working Group 4 of Technical Committee 68 of the International Standards Organisation (ISO TC68/WG4), discussing ISO 20022. But what do all these numbers mean?
TC68 is the ISO technical committee that is responsible for standards in the banking & finance area. ISO 20022 is a standard for generating business messages (in XML) based on a business model (in UML) of the processes, participants, and data that are involved in each section of banking & finance.
The foundations for ISO 20022 were laid in 2000, back in the early days of XML. The technology has moved on in the five years since, as has our understanding of how to get the best value out of the technology. The task of WG4 is to review ISO 20022 and see how the implementation can and should change to make better use the technologies and methodologies that are now available. It is still going to be producing W3C XML Schemas for XML messages, and the models will still be in UML. However, the way this happens should improve. WG4 is aiming to make the process more transparent, more repeatable, more objective, and less labour-intensive.
I'm really looking forwards to WG4. This is one of the most important pieces of work going on in the banking & finance area, in my opinion, because it is where we expect to see convergence of the different flavours of XML that currently exist in different banking & finance niches. People want integration, they want to be able to represent all data in a common way, not the least because companies are continually creating new financial products that are based on multiple existing products, and those new products require that the data for the existing products can be brought together in once place in a simple and consistent manner.
If we get it right, we have a lot to gain, and that is what makes it so important.