The group, called Twist (Treasury Workstation Integration Standards team), is led by the treasury operations department of Royal Dutch/Shell and features input from Barclays Capital, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Currenex, SAP, Wall Street Systems, Trema, XRT, SimCorp, Richmond Software, Integrity Treasury Solutions, Alterna Technologies Group and Selkirk Financial Technologies. The companies say they intend to drive initiatives to achieve interoperability and standards between corporate treasury operations and their banks, "enabling the efficient and controlled integration of treasury solutions with financial marketplaces".

Twist has issued a document specifying FX trade XML data types which has been aligned with FpML, (Financial products Markup Language), the business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial products. The submission by Twist will be considered by the FpML FX Products Working Group, the group responsible for extending the product definition of the current FpML standard to accommodate the use of FpML for FX products.

"Both banks and their clients have an interest in, and responsibility for, ensuring an FX market place which allows participants to transact efficiently and with low operational risks," says Tom Buschman, treasury development manager for Shell Treasury Centre. "This initiative, developed in close cooperation with banks, workstation vendors and their clients, allows for rapid proliferation of efficient and controlled best practices throughout the market place."

He says the Twist taskforce has arrived at a consensus on how the data elements will be included in the message transfer to electronic trading platforms and has also reviewed proposals for delivering trade requests, incorporation of multiple trade participants, non-bank counterparty identification and settlement information.

David Knight, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says: "The work presented and Twist's proposed alignment with standard protocols such as FpML makes it easy for companies to originate their FX trades using one provider's risk management system, execute trades with multi-bank exchanges, and finally, send the trade results directly to another provider's back-end system."