Imported from previous forum
The first thing an organisation wants to do with a standard is to modify it, thus making it no longer a standard. An enterprise is sensible in utilising B2B standards, such as FIXML and FpML that will ease EDI between itself and the outside world, and thus reduce cost. But the need for data exchange and interoperabiity does not stop at the front door.
An enterprise may be very lucky in finding a vendor or vendors whose applications utilise these standards and can provide the interoperability and STP necessary to process a transaction from inception to settlement in a particular business sector. Even then the enterprise will undoubtedly have additional interdepartmental and statutory applications that have proprietary data definitions for the purposes of financial analysis and cross-market integration, which sit outside of the standard.
No B2B standard provides an integrated and consistent cross-market definition, as the definitions need only address a few functions, such as trading and pricing on a market by market basis.
The iceberg analogy seems to fit data standards well, in that the B2B standards are merely the tip, and the rest of the iceberg represents the data standard required for complete Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).
This then leaves financial institutions attempting to stretch the existing B2B standards over the rest of the enterprise, something for which the standards were never intended.
Each institution has a unique mix of third party and in-house developed applications that ensure that no two institutions will share the same data standard for EAI, and therefore, it seems, no standard for EAI can exist.
As each enterprise has it’s own unique set of relationships based on it’s internal structure, the way it both sees and does its business and the unique combination of it’s support systems, it is certainly true that no common standard for EAI can be constructed in the same manner as B2B standards are constructed., i.e. addressing whole business entities, market by market having fixed relationships with no common components for integration.
The answer to extending an existing B2B standard for complete STP and EAI is not to provide a standard, but to provide a standard for the creation of a standard. This is achieved by introducing a set of reusable components that are used to add to exisiting standards or can be used to build new business entities from scratch.
Component built standards provide relatiosnhips that are not fixed and can be tailored to an organisation’s structure and business.
IFMT produces a clear definition of what a financial product, service or transaction is, which in turn provides control over the correct mapping between applications and an understanding of what is being mapped, something Barings Bank could have done with.
The resulting EAI XML standard will be the institution’s edge on reduced interoperability costs and firmer control on mapping from one application to another, reducing risk. In addition a lower cost set of skills is required to construct business entities, for mapping from preformed building blocks than is required to build them from scratch.
For more info - see on this site:
Vendors, Application Software, FIXML; IFMT extensions for EAI.