The end-to-end payments standards chain harmonised

Final links forged

100 percent harmonisation of payment standards was the ambitious goal of a dedicated ISO Payments Standards Evaluation Group (SEG) meeting held at SWIFT premises in late April. Four days of intensive sessions with the major standardisation groups working on the end-to-end payments chain resulted in the outstanding accomplishment of alignment of the UNIFI-compliant standards.

Leonard Schwartz, ABN AMRO

“A number of standards groups have been playing a critical role in bringing the new XML payment standards to the market, but in order to offer the financial community a consistent, end-to-end set of messages, it was critical to ensure 100% alignment,” explained Leonard Schwartz, ABN AMRO and convenor of the meeting. “It did not prove possible to accomplish this via conference calls, so we organised an unprecedented face-to-face meeting with all the groups engaged in this effort to complete harmonisation as quickly and painlessly as possible.”

The trigger for the meeting was fulfilment of the EPC (European Payments Council) requirements for a single standard for use in SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area). “Had we not gone ahead, we would have been missing a golden opportunity to put the customer and interbank pieces of the payments chain together,” noted Schwartz. “With the success of the meeting, we’ve created another landmark for standards harmonisation.”

Eric Veronneau, Natexis Banques Populaires

“Whilst SEPA has provided one of the drivers, the big presence of all players in the global payments market, including corporates and ERP vendors, proves how important the task of harmonisation is. It was crucial that the widest range of participants attended to ensure everyone’s requirements were addressed,” elaborated Eric Véronneau, Deputy Head of Interbank Relationships, Natexis Banques Populaires and member of EPC.

With a scope covering both the ISO validation and the finalisation of harmonisation issues for the payments standards, extensive preparation had been undertaken. Even so, building consensus represented a huge challenge. Some 50 standards experts, with strong opinions and positions to defend, participated. “It has been a time of tough negotiations,” noted Carlo Palmers, Head of Payments Standards Development at SWIFT, “but the results are well worth the effort.”

The next step in bringing the standards to the community is for SWIFT, as the ISO 20022 Registration Authority, to incorporate the conclusions and issue the core documentation for the revised, harmonised and ISO-qualified standards in the second week of July 2006.

Nolan Adarve, HSBC

Nolan S Adarve, SVP, Global Payments and Cash Management Asia Pacific, HSBC summed up, "This has been a very useful opportunity for everyone. From the Asia Pacific perspective, to learn and make use of the knowledge about what is being developed and implemented elsewhere, for example in Europe, and vice versa, helps change everyone's focus from the parochial. We all have global customers, so the standards have to be global too."