swiftML:
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications Markup
Language
Focus:
Securities Processing
DTD
or Schema: Available
here.
Website:
www.swift.com/index.cfm?item_id=2642
Contact:
standards@swift.com.
Founding
& Key Members:
·
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunications (Swift)
Organization:
swiftML is part of the SWIFTStandards group within the Society
for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (Swift) organization.
Background:
swiftML was created by the Swift, which is an industry owned
cooperative providing messaging services to banks, broker-dealers and
investment managers as well as to market infrastructures in payments,
treasury, securities and trade.
SwiftML
operates in the area of securities dealing confirmations, clearing and
settlement. It is part of the organization’s SWIFTStandards
initiative, which aims to correctly define various industry business
standards using modelling techniques.
In July 2001, the organization announced plans to team up with the FIX Protocol organization, which was developing an XML-based version of FIX. The collaboration centers around plans to converge their messaging protocols to create an XML-based version of the ISO 15022 protocol for securities message types, which is being developed by the International Standards Organization (ISO) Working Group 10.
The resultant ISO 15022 XML is to leverage FIX Protocol’s expertise in the pre-trade/trade execution domain, and Swift’s post-trade domain expertise to bring together different parts of the trade life cycle and work through issues “hindering straight-through-processing” (STP).
In
its own initiative Swift had taken the approach of using models and then reverse-engineering them
into the XML format. As such, the business standards are defined in
Unified Modelling Language (UML), and XML is then used as a physical
representation, or syntax, of the defined business messages. The
business standards in UML format are stored in the SWIFTStandards
Repository.
The
design of swiftML aims to address the interoperability issues of
different financial XML implementations. By using modelling techniques,
the business standard can be separated from its physical representation
in XML. This means that the technical XML elements can be modified
without having to alter the business standard. It also allows for
different syntaxes, including non-XML syntaxes, to interoperate through
the use of the common business model.
The
XML format itself is very structured, with business information always
expressed as XML elements or values, and meta data expressed as XML
attributes.
Swift
initially opted to use DTD format, although it plans to move to a
schema-based version. The swiftML DTDs are primarily used to provide a
link to the SWIFTStandards Repository.
The
swiftML standard is being implemented at the Global Straight Through
Processing Association (GSTPA), the Inquiry Link and e-Trust.