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I was wondering the same thing. The only thing that struck me was that this would be useful for fraud - making sure I recognized the transactions that we're hitting. It's not set up that way at all though. It just seems like a social tracking "what's hot" service. Hmm...

Gary,

Even though I don't agree with several of your comments, I appreciate your raising them. Debate and discussion is always important and I love to stir the pot, so thanks for pushing into this space. I'd like to comment on a few things as a corporate user of these standards.

First of all, I think it's wrong to be worried about SWIFT as the Registration Authority of the ISO20022 standards. Their role in this is one of coordination and managing the overhead of having an ISO standard. There is a solid core of FI's, corporates, and a few vendors who are the ones really owning and driving the standard. If SWIFT relinquish their role as the ISO "owner," who will pick it up? My organization is in no position to do it and I'm sure most of the other corporates would feel the same way. - I believe most of us are involved in this initiative "in our spare time" and unable to manage the documentation, process modeling, and publication work required by ISO. In fact, I wouldn't want any of us corporates worrying about that. We should be focused on adding value to the content, not dealing with logistics. SWIFT have an entire part of their organization devoted to the stewardship of standards, which makes them the perfect candidate for the role, and I've seen no evidence of them abusing this position for their own gain. The only other alternative I can think of would be for one of the banks to take it over, which creates more of a proprietary risk to the standard than SWIFT ownership.

Secondly, it's always been clear to me that the spirit of the ISO20022 standards has been and continues to be openness. ISO20022 is not, as you suggest, a device for SWIFT to get more fee-based revenue from corporates. In fact, there is nothing that requires use of SWIFT's product or services when one adopts ISO20022. Any bank supporting ISO20022 should accept messages over FTP, HTTP, AS/2, proprietary channels, web-based upload, etc as well as SWIFT FileAct. At the end of the day, it's just bits and bytes. It's the work to standardize what those bits and bytes contain and how it's interpreted that matters, and that is a very collaborative effort.

Again, Gary, thanks for mixing things up. I hope there's some good discussion to follow...

   - Jeremy

I just hope the US wire clearing organizations embrace ISO20022 rather than creating another proprietary standard.

I understand the Fed is planning to use ISO20022 in the longer term but considering something different in the short-term to get something in place quickly. The short term solution will supposedly be ISO20022-compatible - I hope this holds true and enables transition later.

One thing I was surprised not to see in the BCG executive summary as a way for banks to differentiate in the wholesale payments space was around the end-to-end financial supply chain. I think banks that start providing ways for corporate customers to provide rich data along with payment transactions, and tie incoming payments to invoices will get a lot of interest from MNC's looking to better manage customer credit and cash visibility. That's the kind of value-add banks need to start doing as the transaction-processing side of payments becomes more commoditized.