This agreement outlines a collaborative approach to help the global financial services industry achieve greater efficiencies within the securities transaction life cycle. Both organisations have agreed to join efforts and work together strategically to promote the increased usage of standards to enhance straight-through-processing (STP) and improve integration for the securities industry.

The organisations will work jointly on a number of initiatives including the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for financial services. UML is a method of graphically representing the analysis and design of computer applications and metadata. The OMG Finance Domain Task Force (FDTF) has established a leadership position in this area and is working on a conversion maps effort that will address many of the challenges that FPL and other organisations face with existing message formats. A proof-of-concept test involving FPL and potentially other standards bodies will allow OMG to further validate their specification and drive the adoption of the standard in the financial services industry. Additionally, OMG is also a key participant in the WG4 initiative of TC68, the parent body of the ISO 20022 standard. OMG members are developing standards for message conversions which are critical in FPL's ISO 20022 interoperability and compliance initiatives, collaboration in this area will prove mutually beneficial to both organisations.

Through the Statement of Understanding FPL will receive OMG Domain membership and OMG will receive FPL Industry Relationship membership. Commenting on this development Jim Northey, Co-Chair FPL Americas Regional Committee, The LaSalle Technology Group stated "We are very pleased to be working collaboratively with OMG, both strategically in the overall area of architecture and modeling, and in the tactical area by providing an industry standard approach for automated conversion between disparate financial messaging syntax. Involvement with the OMG should help td help the FPL community in terms of exposure to information technology best practices."

Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO, OMG added, "STP is hampered by the hundreds of payments and other financial messaging formats used throughout the industry, and unfortunately there will never be just one standard message format. However, the partnership between OMG and FPL will be able to leverage the deep and wide domain knowledge of the FPL membership, and OMG's modeling expertise (especially the Model Driven Message Interoperability standard) to enable high-performance, lossless and automated communications between transaction parties."