BIS and Swift to host ISO 20022 hackathon

When I first read the headline I thought this might be something new. It initially looked to be a good idea. However, it doesn’t feel like an innovation hackathon.

The issues of X-border transactions are not new, it’s something that FinTech has been looking to solve for many years now. And they have. We have solutions out there that work, they just don’t run over SWIFT. Solutions such as Transferwise have shown what sort of customer experiences actual customers expect, and they have grabbed a lot of traction and business away from the banks (and by extension SWIFT). Then we have Ripple, who are solving these issues in a very different way, though granted it may not be the desired solution of banks or central banks for obvious reasons, however they do provide a solution to x-border transactions (better than the current offerings from banks and SWIFT). We now have in the marketplace RTGS.global, which has spoken at length about solving these problems, and they are already ISO 20022 based, already enable instant transparent payments (which renders tracking legacy),  can be used by banks and no doubt is a considerably cheaper more modern architecture. They would also be nuts not to have on their roadmap value add services such as identity, screening, AML etc.

So is this really a case of innovation, or a case of SWIFT trying to copy and cobble ideas together to help keep relevant? This feels more like a fishing exercise to inspire the hundreds of engineers SWIFT seem to be trying to onboard...

In response to the above... This is about ISO 20022 not SWIFT or cross-border payments. ISO 20022 is a standard for standards. Payments and FX are just a part of what ISO 20022 defines. If we are to innovate, and you mention identity, sanctions and AML, you have to understand your data and that’s increasingly likely to be in ISO 20022.

Understanding data, ISO 20022 is limited in its view of what data I may need to understand. In its drive to be the standard for all things financial message based, it actually creates payloads and restrictions that just dont apply to almost all use cases. It also leads to wide variances in the actual implementation of ISO 20022 (where it is actually used for payment systems, which is very limited still today)

Sometimes less is more...

@Andrew, I have to agree, it’s the classic paradox though, you either have dozens of standards like FIX (with multiple versions), FoML (with multiple versions), ISO 20022 with endless flavours like SEPA, BOJNet et al or we somehow find a solution that solves everyone’s problem (and usually not for long) and mandate that world-wide, as SWIFT do every November. As someone who’s spent most of my working life dealing with financial messaging transformation, integration and processing I have to say it keeps me busy. If was asked to integrate to a new payments system and they said it was ISO 20022 based (as I have done) I have to say I’d cringe, a simple domain-specific message is usually a lot easier.

I have feeling colleagues that you talk about the format, not Standerd in your posts 

A standard should set the format. The standard sets the datadictionary and attempts to set the format. The issue is that its not perscriptive enough and that it contains too much data. 

Maxim, no one has mentioned formats, XML, ASN.1, JSON, SWIFT 7775/15022, CSV. None of that is important, it’s an implementation detail. I was referring to the ISO 20022 ontology, the data dictionary and its definition in RDF. Frankly it’s a mess, dozens of redefinitions of the same thing, no wonder people struggle with it. That said. It keeps me busy so I’m not complaining :-)