Standardizing Payments

Payment transactions, when applied to either global or national transactions, will present industry technology executives with increased challenges for 2007. For the global environment, the industry standards now under development by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will see rapid adoption in 2007. These new ISO 20022 payment-industry messaging standards address both corporate-to-bank and bank-to-bank messaging. SEPA compliance, SWIFTNet capabilities and enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration are a part of the impetus behind these standards.

The adoption of global and national standards for all domestic payment transactions is important to overall interoperability for domestic payment processes. And getting an understanding of the implications of national adoption of ISO 20022 is a high-priority effort for Accredited Standards Committee X9.

X9's Payments Subcommittee also will focus on developing management system standards to improve interoperability as check processing transitions from a paper flow to an electronic exchange process. A third focus will be the integration of standard information security techniques into payments business practice standards. *