Standards and Celtic Music in Dublin

I spent last week in Dublin at the Guinness Storehouse for the 10th UN/CEFACT Forum. UN/CEFACT develops standards for trade facilitation, i.e. making international trade simpler, easier, and cheaper. Electronic messaging standards are a big part of that.

The UN/CEFACT technology stack is broadly equivalent to ISO 20022 (UNIFI), although ISO 20022 is simpler and focussed on banking and finance, whereas UN/CEFACT's strength is commerce. The two areas of business overlap around payments. That is to say, when a large sum of money is paid from one company to another, it is actually done by sending instructions to the two companies' banks. If that sounds simple, well, it is when everything goes right. However, payments are a complex area because of the things that can go wrong, and managing what to do if something does go wrong.

A set of payments messages for ISO 20022 have recently been published, but the content of those messages has been translated into UN/CEFACT message components (Core Components and Business Information Entities, to use the jargon) so that equivalent messages can be created using the UN/CEFACT process and style. We don't know yet which style of message will become the preferred one for payments, but the outcome could affect the direction that messaging takes in banking and finance in the future, say in the next 5 years (certainly not in the next 6 months or even 1 year).

On a lighter topic, on my last night in Dublin I went on the "Musical Pub Crawl". It's a musical evening led by two professional Celtic musicians (drawn from a pool of those who happen to be in Dublin that evening), and takes place mainly in some private rooms in pubs in Dublin (it is a "crawl", so you have to walk from pub to pub a couple of times). The private rooms are needed because they play acoustic music, just the instruments and voices with no amplifiers and such. The evening I was there, we had Anthony as the guitarist, and Eugene playing the tenor (4-string) banjo (an instrument which was brought from America back to Ireland). Both were brilliant musicians, and they taught us about the different styles of Celtic music and some of the history and culture of Celtic music.

At the end of the evening, they asked the people on the tour to sing, and a request for an Australian meant that I was nominated by my UN/CEFACT colleagues. It guess it wasn't the worst rendition of "Waltzing Matilda" ever; I'm still waiting to see the video that someone took on their phone.

All in all, it was one of the best evenings I've had in ages, so if you find yourself in Dublin sometime, I highly recommend it.