Making ISO 20022 work for you: regulatory compliance

We at SWIFT would like to hear about your ISO 20022 plans, experiences and questions. Starting today and leading up to Sibos, we will launch a series of weekly blogs on Finextra called "Making ISO 20022 work for you", each focusing on a specific ISO 20022 business case and implementation aspect. All blogs will end with an open-ended question. The purpose is not to start an online discussion, but rather to collect your feedback, some of which will be presented during our Standards Forum at Sibos in Singapore, held from 12 to 15 October 2015. The first blog in our series deals with regulatory compliance. Thank you in advance for you participation.

For regulators to feel confident about the correct interpretation of data elements in reporting requirements, and for regulated institutions to equally be confident about compliance with reporting requirements, the financial world needs a single, authoritative library of financial data definitions, to which data components of every relevant transaction can be traced.

As it happens, such single standard set of definitions exists today. ISO 20022 defines the platform for the development of financial message standards. Its business modelling approach allows users and developers to represent financial business processes and underlying transactions in a formal but syntax-independent notation. These business transaction models are the "real" business standards. The data model which lies at the heart of ISO 20022 is a potential reference point to help regulators and market overseers to require, harvest and interpret data which is unambiguous, clear and equivalent from one source to another. This makes the standards an excellent resource through which to ensure that data elements specified in a regulatory reporting context are interpreted consistently by implementers.

ISO 20022-based messages are quickly becoming recognised as the natural transaction language of market infrastructures, which means that individual market participants are already embedding them into their core transaction processing systems. Reference data standards, such as the LEI, are used within and beyond financial messaging, to define the context within which transactions take place in a similarly uniform manner.

Understanding how standards can help the community requires some familiarity with the content, governance, real-world implementation and limitations of standards; and likewise, the standards community needs to learn about regulatory practices in order to provide relevant assistance. This leads us to ask Finextra members the following question: