Peter Guldentops, who served as head of standards at the international banking cooperative Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) from 1993-2000 has joined Web-based trade finance platform bolero.net as the head of its XML standards initiative.
According to bolero.net CEO Barry Morse: "Having led the drive to make Swift the standards authority for the financial industry, we are now looking forward to Peter helping establish bolero.net as the international standards authority for world trade."
The boleroXML initiative, which was launched in April 2000, has already published 52 document data definitions (DTDs) covering the 90% of documents most commonly used in world trade, ranging from Advance Shipment Notices to Import Declarations to Trade Confirmations. Further DTDs are to be published in January and April 2001.
"Because of its neutral, cross industry structure, bolero.net offers an open commercial, and not a proprietary model", says Guldentops. "As a result, we fully intend to involve other standards bodies such as ebXML and RosettaNet in our work."
Neil Chantry senior manager, systems and procedures of HSBC, comments: "Straight through processing of electronic documents to support financial and logistic processes will reduce costs and improve services to importers and exporters around the world. For the first time the world trade community has a shared organisation within which to agree standards and, more importantly, a technological infrastructure through which those standards are enforced".