The growing support among both corporates and banks for the ISO 20022 messsaging standard was illustrated today with the news that Bank of America and Sun Microsystems are piloting a payments processing system based on the specification.
The project is part of a major redesign of Sun's treasury architecture as it attempts to move to a single global platform.
The pilot will run on Sun's Solaris 10 operating system with the first phase concentrating on accounts payable before expanding to cover the whole treasury function.
"In redesigning Sun Microsystems Treasury architecture we are relying on industry standards such as ISO 20022 and Swift for Corporates," says Brad Vollmer, assistant treasurer, Sun Microsystems. "Standardising our business processes and systems interfaces using these systems and our own internal ERP platform running on Solaris, we anticipate acheiving significant efficiencies."
The announcement was made at the Sibos conference in Boston, which includes an inaugural forum dedicated to corporates and a key focus for particpants is the promotion of the ISO 20022 and Swift for Corporates standards.
"The question of which XML standard will everyone support has been out there for years and both sectors, corporates and banks are working together on this," says Susan Colles, senior vice president, Global Corporate Solutions and Support, Bank of America. "With the publication of the ISO standards, the business community now has a set of global XML messaging standards that has been accepted by the financial industry."
The larger corporates are pushing for banks to move to the IS20022 specification as a global standard for payment processing. However, research conducted by Finextra on behalf of SAP reveals that while 87% of Eurozone banks say they will be adopting the new XML message types, approximately one-third say they will use the standard for interbank transfers only.