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Couldn't agree more Aparty - ISO 20022 is seriously useful when looking at a BCBS 239 RDA model. The ISO 20022 Business Model is a universally trusted foundation for a common language/glossary, and the e-Repository (http://www.iso20022.org/e_dictionary.page) is a great model for your financial transaction data and much more... 

I note that you've only mentioned seven of ISO 20022's currently 22 published business areas though? (http://www.iso20022.org/full_catalogue.page) Do you consider the others less relevant to BCBS 239?

Kind regards,

Jamie

Good points, well made, Steve

I believe that SWIFT Standards and the ISO 20022 RA are working to clean up old and unused or redundant logical message components at this very moment - This is a non-trivial task, constrained as they are by the very strong governance and change controls built into the ISO 20022 standard, and by the need to ensure that users of the standard are not impacted by such "technical optimisation" efforts. It appears to be working though, because I’m only seeing 67 CorporateActionOption and 26 CashAccount Message Components in the latest e-Repository (published October 5th) - There’s obviously still some way to go, but that’s already a big step in the right direction - the ongoing push towards industry harmonisation will greatly accelerate this work if it can help ISO to retire some of the very old messages.

When looking to define an internal model though, a unique strength of ISO 20022 among financial standards is that each of these logical Message Components is a view on a single Business Component in ISO 20022’s normalised conceptual model. It is a fact of life that there will always be many different logical and physical representations of information across hundreds of different financial business transactions, but at least in ISO 20022 these are all representations of a single globally standardised information concept.

To make this a bit more concrete based on your examples, the ISO 20022 Business Model defines the CashAccount concept only once – all business attributes of a CashAccount are also standardised once, and the CashAccount’s place in the hierarchy of accounts is formally specified. Its associations to other financial concepts (such as AccountOwner and AccountServicer, AccountContract, …) are also formally modelled at the conceptual level. The same is true for the single CorporateActionOption Business Component.

So, even if we are looking for a technical internal canonical messaging model, our search can be very powerfully guided by starting at the business model. Once we understand the big picture of the concept we are looking to model as a message, DDL, Web service, …, we can follow ISO 20022’s traces down from the Business Model to understand how the concept physically manifests in a specific business process, business transaction, and messaging flow. In this way, ISO 20022 even supports us to model independently of the physical syntax (for example, independent of whether your CashAccount information happens to be in an ISO 20022 XML syntax message, a FIX message, an MT message, a database record, …)

As you know though, the reality is not yet as simple as the theoretical story that I tell here, and I agree that that this is likely to be behind the dearth of public success stories. This is a great example of the kind of challenge that we’re looking to tackle in the Architects’ Forum mentioned above though – watch for your invitation coming soon Steve ;-)