We arrived at the Standards Forum stand bright and early for a team briefing. Very impressive always. 

This year the corrugated cardboard makes way for recycled wooden crates.  Looks a bit like a loft in the Village. What will they think of next?  Quick sound check; Two. One-two. One. Two. One-two; and we’re ready to rock and roll.

Most of the sessions were sold out, standing room only. Here are some highlights.

In the lunchtime session around the future of standards the panelists shared a sense of frustration that we as an industry haven’t made more progress towards a single data model for the industry, and that we collectively still “think in messages”.  The immediate future will bring a focus on choreography; described as “machine readable and automatable descriptions of how to use the messages”; and the introduction of semantics into standards, a way to formally encapsulate the meaning of the underlying data.  There was a commitment to collaborate with other industries that face similar technical challenges, and a recognition that regulators are now an important part of the standards ecosystem.

In the final session of the day, Karla McKenna noted that there was a conscious decision to publish the 20022 metamodel, and the panel discussed the implications of that in some detail; “start small”, “win the hearts and minds of the Enterprise Architects”, “not to expect an immediate ROI”.  The panelists offered their thoughts on the immediate future for the model: convergence and harmonization of syntaxes was a common theme, the need for a simpler view of the model, and related to that, a call to action for the vendor community to create the products and tools that will put the model into the hands of the banks.

Quotes of the day.

“It costs more to deliver a security than it does to deliver a washing machine. “  [Editors note: Ouch!]

“LEI is a globally shared golden source of data”

“Nobody is implementing the ISO 20022 business model in legacy systems, they are implementing messages”

“It makes no sense to develop standards in three repositories”

“In all of our [SWIFT’s] initiatives in Middle East and Africa, Standards is on the agenda”

“Syntax neutrality was always the dream”

“Penetration of standards in the financial industry is relatively low”

“ISO 20022 was supposed to be the standard to end all standards” [Ed: it still is!]