SWIFT is taking aim at its MT/MX/ISO 20022 offerings with a new web-based, collaborative platform, dubbed MyStandards, which is intended to help firms improve the development of their financial messaging infrastructures.
Konstantin (Kosta) Peric,
head of innovation,
SWIFT
Describing the MyStandards initiative as “something close to his heart,” Konstantin (Kosta) Peric, head of innovation for SWIFT, says the MyStandards application was created to replace the often manual, time-consuming and error-prone effort of building and maintaining a firm’s financial messaging infrastructure. The initiative got its start via the cooperative’s Innotribe innovation incubator unit and is the first commercialized offering from that group.
Available next month, the MyStandards application, still in pilot phase, has been vetted with SWIFT clients via several projects. SWIFT is hoping the MyStandards system will appeal to business analysts, product and project managers and standards implementers at financial institutions, market practice and market infrastructure groups and corporations.
The collaboration via MyStandards is aided by a centralization of all standards-related content, which helps firms access and interpret standards-related information relevant to their businesses, officials say. The platform will help firms analyze, implement and keep track of new releases. They will also be able to develop usage guidelines that are part of internal and customer specifications and/or conform to the guidelines of a market practice organization. The MyStandards software can also be used for global and local market practices, bilateral guidelines and internal specifications.
The MyStandards software can generate and publish documentation without manual intervention, officials say. The platform can automate the generation of PDF documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for base standards and usage guidelines; the system can also create Excel spreadsheets for comparisons. In addition, MyStandards generates schemas for base MT and MX standards and usage guidelines.
Before MyStandards, clients have tackled SWIFT standards development with ad hoc solutions and manual processes, says the inventor of the new platform Marc Delbaere, who is also the head of research and development standards for SWIFT. For instance, a firm could have 30 variations of a SWIFT MT payment standard that have to be streamlined for cost savings and more efficient operations, Delbaere says. The new software is intended to help that firm quickly simplify its MT messaging.
“We have currently over 35 organizations that have defined specifications in MyStandards as part of the pilot phase,” Delbaere says. The effort has inspired many securities-related practice groups such as the global Steering Committee Securities Market Practice Group (SMPG) and many specific local MPGs, including those for the US, United Kingdom, Italy and Luxembourg.
The MyStandards initiative has also caught the attention of the international central securities depository Clearstream, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC), and major market infrastructure efforts such as the European Central Bank’s TARGET2-Securities (T2S) initiative to end the disparities in cost, processing and efficiency between cross-border and domestic settlement, officials say.
The collaborative nature of the MyStandards efforts should yield best-practice guidance for SWIFT clients.
“There are already best practices in terms of how you can customize standards,” Delbaere says. “This has been an important deliverable from the pilot phase. We also expect MyStandards to contribute to the harmonization of market practices over time.”
Once the MyStandards effort gains momentum, SWIFT clients could consider applying what they’ve learned to non-SWIFT industry efforts, Peric says. “We’ll start with SWIFT standards,” he says.
SWIFT will offer MyStandards via two license levels: a free basic license for reviewing the content and some basic features of the platform; and a payable premium license that gives access to services such as impact analyses and the comparison of standards efforts in various countries, officials say.
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