Financial messaging network Swift is assembling a group of pilot users to help define a new collaborative Web-based platform for more efficient standards management.
The MyStandards concept got its first public airing at an innovation workshop held at the annual Swift user forum, Sibos in October.
The idea is to capture bilateral and multilateral agreements, market practices, and market infrastructure specifications and upload them to the MyStandards Website where they can be analysed for production issues pre-release and shared and refined with counterparties.
"It is tempting to call the MyStandards concept the Facebook of standards'," says Swift project manager Tom Alaerts. "That's actually not really correct, the aim is not co create a typical social network, rather a powerful way to manage and share standards information, in a much better and efficient way than the typical "electronic paper" based methods."
He says that Swift has assembled a number of the technology elements for the platform to work in an offline mode and is now looking for a group of pilot users to test the concept as part of a standards project support package.
The objective would be to release a Version 1.0 of the MyStandards platform in time for Sibos 2011, with a live launch later in the year or at the beginning of 2012.
In order to create a wide universe of users, access to the basic platform would be free for all Swift members, says Alaerts. Tier-based subscription pricing would open up more advanced features such as the creation of formal specifications, standards release impact analysis, and comparison features.