FIX Protocol Ltd. (FPL), Financial Products Markup Language (FpML), International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC), Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) US and Financial Information Services Division of SIIA (FISD), today published their updated Investment Roadmap. The roadmap’s purpose is to provide market participants consistent direction when using financial services messaging standards by visually mapping the protocols to their appropriate business processes across asset classes.
The Investment Roadmap, initially introduced in 2008, lays the groundwork for moving towards one common business model, ISO 20022, while allowing the respective standards organizations to continue maintaining their existing protocols – FIX, ISO, FpML and XBRL (the newest addition). The Investment Roadmap presentation and related FAQ are now publicly available for download from the ISO 20022 website.
Commenting on this initiative, Gary Probert, managing director, Citi Securities and Fund Services, and chair of ISITC, stated, “The Investment Roadmap is reflective of how, through the collaboration of industry associations, we are able to provide guidelines that can help bring best practices to the industry as a whole. ISITC members and the broader industry will benefit from the ISO 20022 developments outlined in the Roadmap which we are confident will improve STP across securities market processes.”
Through collaboration and by leveraging the expertise of each of the standards organizations in their respective asset classes and business process areas, the group looks to improve interoperability, save costs of maintaining multiple syntaxes within the same area of the transaction lifecycle, provide stability, and decrease risk for the international financial services community. In addition to providing the industry with a view of the ways in which existing messaging standards are currently utilized, the Investment Roadmap defines an agreed path for future initiatives by identifying gaps as well as areas of overlap.
Gerard Hartsink, senior executive vice president, ABN Amro, and Convenor of the ISO 20022 Registration Management Group (RMG), commented “The Investment Roadmap is an important step in the harmonization of the Securities industry using the ISO 20022 business model and domain specific syntaxes. It is an idea that can be leveraged by other business areas to support their plans for ISO 20022 interoperability and adoption.”
The organizations will continue to meet on a regular basis to ensure the Investment Roadmap continues to accurately depict the current environment as well as future standards development.
