Golden Copy: Sibos Preview

With this year's Sibos conference beginning today, it could be useful to look at what has developed with issues of importance for data management that I cited in a column evaluating their progress right after last year's event.

Adoption of ISO 20022, the financial messaging standard, has been a long-term challenge, in the works for several years, and likely still for several more. Since last October, when it appeared that adoption, or even migration to ISO 20022, varied among markets, something has come along that could change that.

Firms looking to make the most of distributed ledger technology (DLT) for data management are finding they must standardize financial data, including messaging data, to do so. Something to watch for at Sibos, or perhaps even to ask those who are trying to promote more adoption of ISO 20022, is whether the demand for DLT is going to be effective at speeding up more widespread adoption of ISO 20022.

Also, after last year's Sibos, I stated that it appeared Swift was not the only major provider competing in the know-your-customer (KYC) data management space, with its KYC Registry. Since then, in the past year, Swift appears to have gained ground in KYC. As of January, its KYC Registry had more than 2,000 financial institutions on board, and at the end of June, Swift partnered with Dow Jones to make KYC Registry information available more widely. (Actually by that point, the number of banks and funds on the registry had climbed to 2,500, according to Swift.)

On both the ISO 20022 and KYC fronts, just in the past year, Swift—which of course organizes the Sibos conference, providing a central focus on its various industry efforts—has strengthened its status as a key provider to serve industry needs. For example, it had notably attracted ING to the KYC Registry and LCH to its ISO 20022 harmonization efforts.

It will be interesting to see, based on what gets presented at this year's Sibos, what the organization will do with the lead it has achieved.