ISO 20022: Making the haystack smaller

Standards Forum Day Three was all about compliance and regulation.  "Less conversation" is not a phrase that one would normally expect see in the same sentence as "Sibos" but there it is in the title of the first session of the day.

The panelists discussed regulators and the fact that they are starting to engage standards organisations as part of the process of writing their rules.  This has long been predicted and is most welcome.

This led to a suggestion that perhaps the regulators should compare notes to ensure a certain level of consistency. 

A major light-bulb moment ensued.  Why can’t we have a Harmonisation Charter for Regulators?  

Consistency for the financial institutions is important. The cost savings to the industry if reporting can be standardized (to the greatest extent possible) across jurisdictions is HUGE.

Also important is the consistency between regulators.  One of the primary goals of regulation is to maintain the integrity of the financial system.  Global markets are so inter-connected that regulators need to share data with each other, and in order to do this in a meaningful way we absolutely need to have a common understanding of the underlying data. 

A second panel discussed the need for standards to support compliance. 

- "Can standards provide more direct support for the pattern matching algorithms?"  Still trying to wrap my mind around that one.

- "Standards alone will not solve all our problems" we heard, "but they will make the haystack smaller."

There was even talk of "50" and "59" which caught me completely by surprise… we don’t talk about actual tags anymore do we? 

Despite that, the overarching message was "ISO 20022.  Go for it!"  Can someone tell the Payments MWG?