Securities standards migration: ISO 15022 vs ISO 20022

The financial services industry has a long journey ahead of it as it migrates to the use of the ISO 20022 standard. Cross-border securities settlement processes have only recently moved to the use of ISO 15022 and most domestic securities settlement is still carried out with relatively little use of the standard. Meanwhile, more and more of the industry's pre-trade and trade activities have moved to adopt the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol standard, as have exchanges and other core infrastructures. The process of migration is further complicated by the broad range of changes that are continually taking place across the industry, making it impossible to find a 'quiet time' during which changes could be made with minimal disruption to a firm's usual business. Adding to this difficulty is the fact that industry standards are being further developed even while market participants are implementing current versions.Having the right tools in place to plan for and complete such a journey is vital to success. The use of a metadata repository for information management and understanding can increase the efficiency of migration projects, as can the use of middleware to allow firms to make changes to different parts of their processes and applications while they are still being used to support the business. One should not confuse the difficulty and complexity of migrating a whole industry with the much more limited changes involved in migrating one application service provider's relatively limited user base.