New York – 15 May 2006 – Progress toward a unified standard in the financial industry shifted into high gear at the ISO 20022 (UNIFI) Registration Management Group (RMG) meeting in New York last week. This was the group’s second formal gathering in 2006 having kicked off the year with their first meeting in January in Berlin.
Representatives from nine countries and seven liaison organizations met over two days to continue the hard work of harmonization and convergence that is so vital to process of standardization. The RMG welcomed representation from Italy for the first time as well as welcoming VISA as a new liaison organization. This brings the RMG membership to 18 countries and 9 international liaison organizations. Italy’s representative is also a member of the European Association of Corporate Treasurers. This adds the welcome perspective of corporates to the RMG.
Bob Blair, Vice-Convenor of the Payments Standards Evaluation Group (SEG) gave an update on the Payments SEG. More than 20 new messages are nearing completion in this market area and will be published as final UNIFI messages before the summer. Bob also reported that the European Payment Council formally endorsed the use of these upcoming UNIFI messages in the context of interbank payment communication for SEPA in Europe.
Karla McKenna, Convenor of the Securities SEG and recently nominated as the next chairperson of TC68, gave an update on the Securities SEG. Ongoing work in the investment funds area, as well as new work in the area of portfolio valuation and corporate actions will be taking up time in the near term. Euroclear have already submitted one new request in the area of issuers’ agent notifications and more submissions in the area of issuers’ agent workflows are expected.
New submissions in the area of trade services and foreign exchange prompted the RMG to decide to form two additional SEGs over the course of the coming months, one for Trade Services and one for Foreign Exchange. Details of the scope of the new SEGs and calls for participation will be sent out to the financial community shortly.
Significant progress was also reported from Working Group 4 (WG4). WG4 is the working group created by ISO late last year to work on improving the ISO 20022 standard from a technical as well as process point of view. WG4 had a successful meeting in March of this year and have agreed on several steps that will help improve
the syntax independence and transactional dimension of ISO 20022 through the perfection of a meta-model. These steps will ultimately lead to easier and quicker implementations of the new standard because developers will be able to more uniformly integrate the ISO 20022 models and transactions generated under ISO 20022.
