Collaboration on standards tool speeds development
A new web-based tool developed jointly between Swift and a group of pilot users provides a comprehensive mechanism for financial institutions to communicate service information with their customers, as well as improve internal management of standards and market practices.
Called MyStandards, the tool will be available generally next year, but initial reports from the pilot customers suggest that it will go beyond its original brief of being a simple management tool, thanks in large part to the interactive rapid development methodology that was used to develop it.
Speaking at a session in the Standards Forum yesterday, Bernard Lenelle, senior vice-president, product management for core products and business strategy at Clearstream, said the process had meant that “we have been very close and had a constant interaction with the developers”.
Veronique Peters, project manager at Bank of New York Mellon, agreed: “It has been really comfortable – Swift has been asking for feedback all through, and we’ve been getting the results of that come back to us.”
The success of the development methodology has already seen it adopted in a number of other projects, observed Brian Crabtree, director of market practices standards and Swift at Citi, who described it as a “very effective, collaborative, iterative approach”.
Essentially, MyStandards is a wiki, a web-based method of collaborating on the creation and sharing of information, the most famous example of which is Wikipedia. Financial institutions can use My Standards to capture information about their use of standards and their business and market practices. Internally this improves documentation of this kind of information, and addresses the problems of managing changes.
Typically, within Citi, for example, this is done manually using Excel spreadsheets to capture the information, and the spreadsheets have to be transformed into actionable change requirement projects as new products and services are added. “This can be a very heavy process,” said Crabtree. For Citi, the main direction is to “make that effort easier to manage, and to improve sales and implementation with new customers as well as for internal dissemination of all information”.
Lenelle said MyStandards acts as a “single repository of all data, which is something we have been looking for for a long time”. The ease of contribution means that there is a risk that the database could become cluttered by some users adding or amending data, so it will still require a disciplined management approach.
Asked if this meant that there was a danger that the standards approach could itself be debased by users adding endless work-arounds and “quick-fixes” of their own, BNY Mellon’s Peeters said: “Within the boundaries of the standard, there is freedom in terms of the information you are propagating – that is part of your business process and it is important to know about that.”
Lenelle, who is co-chair of the corporate actions sub-group of the Securities Market Practice Group, said capturing of market practice is also greatly facilitated by the MyStandards tool. By collaborating on this, institutions will be able to concentrate on more competitive issues. “We should not be competing on standards – we should compete on services and MyStandards can communicate what those services are to customers.”
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