Seven Most Important Industry Standards for the Banking Industry

Financial Industry especially Banking Industry, is one of the highly IT dependent industry who need a lot of standardization for data communication or reporting. Listed below seven most important standard in Banking Industry

1. UNIFI

UNIFI is the ISO 20022 UNIversal Financial Industry message scheme. It describes a model-driven process for defining electronic finance messages and provides a repository where messages defined according to the process can be registered. Most if not all of the standards bodies in the finance industry are using or planning use the UNIFI process to define standards.

2. TC68

TC68 is a technical committee within the International Standards Organization (ISO) focusing on standardization in the field of banking, securities and other financial services. WG4 focuses on the development of ISO 20022 that defines UNIFI - the UNIversal Financial Industry message scheme.

3. Industry Value Network (IVN) For Banks

In 2005, SAP was approached by a number of banks to discuss the challenges of interoperability, particularly with respect to front office business processes where internally developed applications dominate many large banking operations. An initial working group was created by SAP and a number of banks, service and technology partners that included ABN Amro, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Postbank, ING, Standard Bank and many others. The working group was challenged with defining a standard approach to enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for banking business processes. Specifically, the goal was to define services in the emerging banking application landscape such that internally developed software and commercial-off-the-software could both be leveraged by banks to deliver maximum flexibility at the lowest possible cost.

4. SWIFT

SWIFT is a co-operative established by and for the financial industry that provides secure, standardized messaging services and interface software to over 8,100 financial institutions in 208 countries and territories. SWIFT members include banks, broker-dealers and investment managers. While it is a private organization, in many ways, SWIFT is the acknowledged leader in international standards-setting for the financial industry.

5. OMG Finance Domain Task Force

The Object Management Group (OMG) is the primary creator of standards for model-driven systems and has promulgated a suite of modeling and metadata standards under the rubric of Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Model-driven approaches to software development are crucial for Enterprise SOA. SAP supports the core MDA standards UML, MOF, XMI, and CWM, and the related JMI standard. SAP's Composite Application Framework (CAF) and the Business Intelligence SDK use MOF, XMI, and JMI for metadata management and the Business Intelligence SDK uses CWM as well

6. XBRL

XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data which is changing business reporting around the world. Companies use XBRL to save costs and streamline their processes for collecting and reporting financial information. Consumers of financial data, including investors, analysts, financial institutions and regulators, can receive, find, compare and analyze data much more rapidly and efficiently if it is in XBRL format.

7. OAGI

The Open Applications Group (OAGi) is a not-for-profit open standards organization that defines process-based XML standards call Business Objects Documents (BODs) that span both B2B and A2A integration scenarios. The Open Applications Group was formed in late 1994 as one of the first post-EDI organizations focusing on improving the state of application integration. The adoption of OAGi specifications is primarily in North America however there is emerging adoption in the European Union and Asia. OAGi is a member of the IST Harmonization group in UNIFI which seeks to standardize the area of electronic payments.