Does anyone know what the standards body (or if there is one) is for financial transactions / banking transactions? i.e. If I was writing a computer program to move financial information from one bank to another, what would the format “standard” be that I would expect or be expected to use?
I suspect that this may vary from country to country and from time to time (although a friend omine makes a reasonable living updating ancient Cobol programs for the industry). I would suspect that most will be moving to XML based data transfer and you will find some national/international standards for, e.g. address data. Banks do have their own internal programmers and contractors. You may have problems convincing them to use 3rd party software or external contractors.
For structured products in investment banking, the standard is supposed to be FPML http://www.fpml.org/ but none of the IB contractors I know have ever heard of it! If you're interested in working for a bank as a programmer, the best and most interesting place to start is to get a job as a contractor in the back office to get some experience or working for one of the big consultancy/outsourcing firms. Angela
My programming days are behind me! I have a meeting next week, and the topic is banking, so I am looking to research the data standards before the meeting so I have some context for the conversation.
