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Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the post - you make a great point and I can reassure you that the SWIFT Standards team is on the case. We will be talking about exactly this at Sibos and via other channels. Watch this space!

Hi Steve, and thanks for drawing everyone's attention to SR 2016 – it is indeed important to start planning early.

Just to add a little detail to your commentary – the number of changes requests (CRs) accepted this year is historically low – 29 across all categories, 13 in category 5. A further 15 will be implemented that were deferred from last year. However, this still adds up to quite a number of individual changes because a few of the CRs impact a large number of Cat 5 message types, notably one that introduces LEI as a party identifier, and another that allows negative values for yields in price fields. 

The business highlights of SR 2016 can be found here:

http://www.swift.com/assets/swift_com/documents/products_services/sr_next_business_highlights.pdf 

Stephen Lindsay / SWIFT Standards

Thanks for the post Neil – you make a great point. It’s true that fragmentation threatens to undermine some of the benefits of ISO 20022 (although the problem is by no means limited to this standard). As an industry we need to act to bring this problem under control.

As noted in your post, SWIFT is working with the Market Infrastructure community to address this issue, and there are many other initiatives that have this as their goal. But it’s important to be clear about the practical limits of harmonization. Many of the differences in the way standards are used arise from genuine differences in market practice and behaviour from one place to another, and these are largely unavoidable, or at least require harmonization that goes beyond standards towards national rules and practices. Other differences are a consequence of disconnected groups of users finding different standards solutions to the same problem. These are typically much easier to fix - or better yet prevent at source - by ensuring that groups working on standards are aware of each other and collaborate to agree best practice, and this is therefore the obvious place to begin successful harmonization.

It’s also worth noting that despite the complexity, SEPA did manage to replace 28 national legacy standards, developed over decades and in isolation, with a single standard – ISO 200222. And it works – I can send EUR from one Eurozone country to another as easily and cheaply as within one country. Overall that adds up to a great achievement, both for the standard and for the industry.