A Conversation With Joseph Eng
WST: Why did you chose XML and when did you make that decision?
Joseph Eng: Well, that was a decision made last year, so that has been in place for a while. Part of it is really the industry prevalence of that technology and that language. It is something that is taking hold in not just the financial industry but networking technology in general. So that is one of the big drivers for adopting that language. It gives us flexibility in terms of being able to depict the type of messages that we need to send back and forth between financial institutions.
WST: How do you plan to get the industry to adopt just one standard?
Joseph Eng: Yes, well part of it is to introduce our standards methodology with our Standards- Workstation. Part of why you may have multiple standards popping up is standards are typically time consuming, long-cycle time type of processes. So you have this time to investigate new things, but we are trying to make it an easier process and more efficient from a time perspective. So that is one of the vehicles that we see as far as gaining consensus. Secondly, we are not so cavalier as to think we are going to be able to drive the industry all to one standard, and certainly we need to deal with a transition period even if the industry were to go to one standard. So as part of the next generation, we need to think about translators and put forth message translators into our network as a value added set of functionality.
WST: And right now S.W.I.F.T. does not do any type of translating for other standards? It-s either S.W.I.F.T. or nothing, right?
Joseph Eng: That-s right ...
WST: That brings me to another question. Are you doing any work with middleware vendors to allow messaging between firms that aren-t using S.W.I.F.T.?
Joseph Eng: One of the things S.W.I.F.T. is doing that is a change in terms of its approach from the past'-and certainly one of the things that I want to bring to S.W.I.F.T.'-is that we are much more about working with and leveraging technology in the market place. Whether it be middleware, databases, decision support, reporting applications, we are leveraging much more technology in the market place. And that has a lot to do with promoting interoperability. It also allows us to provide overall technology solutions in a more cost effective, fast cycle time manner instead of having to build everything ourselves. If you had to draw extremes in terms of S.W.I.F.T. in the past vs. S.W.I.F.T. today and in the future'we are taking more of a bi-integration approach to technologies that exist in the marketplace. ...We want to provide our next generation technology, which is basically IP-based technology'but we know that we need to support connecting up with various types of technology that exists in our user constituency. That could be mainframe technology, Unix technology, so we will use various vendor-based middleware to allow our user constituency to hook up to our network.
WST: With this next generation of standards, will there be specific standards for the securities industry that are different from payments and banking industry?
Joseph Eng: Each industry will have different content because they do different things with different messages, and they have different business processes. So within the common syntax we see some differentiation for securities vs. payments vs. electronic trade services.
WST: As a CIO, what emerging technologies are you looking at applying to S.W.I.F.T. and STP?
Joseph Eng: XML is one and PKI for security. ...We are also integrating vendor technologies from the market place, whether Unix platforms or middleware. There are a whole host of vendors that we are working with to incorporate their technologies into our infrastructure.
WST: Can you name some of those vendors?
Joseph Eng: We are working with Oracle. We are working with BEA for their Tuxedo technology. We worked with IBM with their classic mainframe, so those are some examples. ... I don-t want to imply that we are partnering with them. Partnerships tend to become overused terminology in our industry. ...These are technologies that have large, industry-wide acceptance; they have large use within our constituency and thus support the goals of next generation. So those are some of the reasons they have been incorporated into our infrastructure.
Tweet This