Business Solutions
ISO 20022 - no big game changer
Alan Jones of SmartStream Technologies says there is still a lot of work to be done before the industry reaps the benefits of the new ISO 20022 standards.This week's Sibos conference in Toronto has been dominated by talk of the new ISO 20022 XML standards and XBRL for corporate actions, The DTCC in the US is spearheading the move towards the new ISO standards, launching a pilot program involving its SMART network and SWIFT for testing the new ISO 20022 corporate actions messages.
Citi is currently working with XBRL US on a pilot program to demonstrate the cost savings and benefits of using XBRL in the corporate actions processing of dividend payment announcements for American Depositary Receipts.
However, Alan Jones, product manager, SmartStream Technologies, says firms are only just getting used to the ISO150022 standards and are not ready to move to ISO 20022. He says some segments of the market, such as hedge funds, are not even SWIFT enabled and do not see how the new SWIFT standards will impact them. "Some are quite excited about the ability to streamline the whole process, but how are they going to get enforcement?" asked Jones. "The DTCC may be taking a stance on ISO 20022 but how do you get global regulatory mandates?"
Jones says there is a lot of work to be done before the industry reaps the benefits of the new ISO 20022 standards. "There are two main issues," he said. "Enforcement of XBRL to get informatin from the issuer to the investor without having to manually manipulate it. There is also the corporate action reference number associated with a single event throughout its lifecycle."
"There are still so many problems at the issuer level," Jones continues. "Event ID standards are still progressing and questions regarding how quickly ISO 2022 is being implemented."
Date Posted:23rd September 2011