It all starts from the beginning

The Standardised Trust community aims to create a common semantics for Trade Finance to enable its interoperability and standardisation irrespective of any type of implementations or technology behind the implementations.  This common goal was defined about two years ago in the community White Paper, still very valid nowadays.  It took some time to expand the group both in amount of active members and geographies.  Also a structure of governance was created for this voluntary and no strings attached team, consisting of Trade Finance, Emerging Tech and digital transformation experts.  We originate from various international organisations and are committed to help the multitude of Trade Finance stakeholder groups to boost a simpler and more digital future for Trade Finance.

Now the very first concrete steps have been taken.  Community’s working groups #1 and #2 (End-To-End business processes and standards & semantics working groups) started to collaborate to make a draft semantic model for the bank guarantees.  It was an easy decision to start with this narrower scope Trade Finance instrument family instead of currently complex Letter of Credit structures.  The base model is coming from ISO 20022 Trade Domain business and data model.  We made a preliminary analysis of existing standards and concluded that year 2013 created ISO 20022 model for Guarantees and Stand-By Letter of Credits fits best for the purpose.  It is already somewhat outdated and due to lacking true market implementations it is not proven in practice hence not have had any change request to updated.  Still it beats well in structures the existing (even upcoming) MT798/MT76x message set.

We took very practical approach and started to go through the ISO 20022 tsin.005, UndertakingApplicationV01 message and discussed it through in a full day physical meeting.  We decided after this first evaluation that it has nice basement to continue.  Now we have taken practical and simple use cases and start testing the challenged semantic model with practical implications.  The very first use case is a Finnish rental guarantee that was already mapped to the semantic model.  We will continue the work still before summer holidays and hope that we will have good enough model to expand for more complex use cases after summer holidays. 

As we work fully openly, the draft working document material can be accessed and updated by the active members whenever wanted via cloud based document storage (OneDrive) and then to invite more active members to join the work, we release also some documents here at the www.standardisedtrust.com home page.  We of course hope that we will more active members from our LinkedIn group followers and also outside that group from any interested volunteer that has a passion to make this financial services business area available for digital transformation.

Avoid FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and join us.  We will need your contribution! The Standardised Trust Community