ISO TC68, UN/CEFACT TBG5 and SWIFT sign cooperation agreement

Significant milestone on the road to standards convergence

The financial arms of ISO and UN/CEFACT have signed a cooperation agreement with SWIFT which could lead to significant standards convergence. The signing took place on 17 June at SWIFT’s headquarters, following separate plenary sessions held by ISO TC68 and UN/CEFACT TBG5.

The objective is to formalise an investigation effort to check the feasibility of convergence between ISO TC68 and UN/CEFACT methodologies for development of message standards and, if the result is positive, to describe how and with what timelines they could converge.

Mark Zalewski, Chairman of ISO TC68 – Financial Services, commented on the importance of this milestone occasion, “We see this as a formal indication of what has been talked about many years. Now we have a concrete first step in place.”

Yves Gailly, Chairman of UN/CEFACT TBG5 – Finance, agrees, “For a very long time, organisations have been standardising independently. Now we can work much more in cooperation, which will lead to greater interoperability between the bodies themselves and the financial industry.”

The role of UNIFI (ISO 20022)

UNIFI (ISO 20022 – UNIversal Financial Industry message scheme) is the new ISO TC68 international standard for development of financial messages. UNIFI’s purpose is to achieve standards convergence among all organisations that develop messages to support financial business transactions. The main innovation of the standard, which builds on the UN/CEFACT approach, is its application and syntax neutral modelling methodology, which enables organisations to define their business transactions independently of the syntax of the messages. This facilitates interoperability between various syntaxes, as well as the move to newer syntaxes as they emerge.

Another pillar of UNIFI is the central financial repository that will ensure consistency of business information and its representation across all financial messages. Several organisations are already defining UNIFI compliant messages, including the IST Harmonisation Team initiative on the core payments kernel.

“TC68 will manage the implementation of ISO 20022 in areas that affect consumer, corporate and institution-to-institution transaction standards,” notes Zalewski.

The role of UN/CEFACT

In parallel, UN/CEFACT (United Nations/Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) has been working on a global application and technology neutral modelling approach to describe business processes of all industries and the underlying business transactions and message sets. This approach is also based on a central repository of core components that should ensure coherence of messages defined, regardless of industry sector. The UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS) has recently been submitted to ISO for approval and several standards organisations active in various industries have already stated their intention to be CCTS compliant.

Ensuring coherence

SWIFT has actively contributed to both initiatives and has worked at preserving alignment as much as possible between the new ISO and UN/CEFACT methodologies. As finance is a ‘horizontal’ industry servicing all other ‘vertical’ industries, it is key to ensure coherence between message standards developed in finance and those of other industry sectors. This facilitates end-to-end STP of business transactions from the originating industry right through to the final destination. SWIFT acts as the ISO ‘Registration Authority’ in charge of the UNIFI financial repository and has offered to UN/CEFACT the service of guardian of their finance-related items.

The purpose of the cooperation agreement is to analyse what needs to be changed to ensure that the content of UNIFI compliant messages can be ‘harmonised’ with the content of messages developed by other CCTS compliant industries, and fed into the future global UN/CEFACT repository. The analysis will include the necessary changes to the methodologies, the impact on the UNIFI Registration Authority services, the impact — if any — on the communities of users, and a proposal for the convergence roadmap. The result of the analysis, which is expected in early 2005, will be submitted to the approval of the three signatories.

This collaboration is further progress under the Memorandum of Understanding on e-Business between IEC, ISO, ITU and UN/ECE, which recommends general use of CCTS.

Summing up, Martine De Weirdt, Head of Standards at SWIFT, said, “Signing of the cooperation agreement leads the way to a closer harmonisation of standards, which is good news for the community. We’re delighted to have been able to help make this happen.”

UN/CEFACT vision

The role of TC68

UN/CEFACT’s vision is to provide 'simple, transparent and effective processes for global commerce'. In order to realise this goal, UN/CEFACT researched advances in information and communication technology and adopted approaches to trade facilitation based on simplification and harmonization of business processes.

TC68, Financial Services was formed in 1948, one of ISO's first committees. TC68 has an excellent history of developing well-used and implemented technical standards for Financial Services. The standards written by TC68 members have fostered cross-border commerce and data interchange for banking, the securities industry, internet financial services and the technical security framework to protect consumers, financial institutions and the environment in which financial institutions operate.