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FTF NEWS PREVIEWS SIBOS by Eugene Grygo and Ryan BoysenFTF News checks in with Fundtech, Information Mosaic, IntelliMatch, Misys, SmartStream and XSP about what they expect from the SWIFT conference.Editor’s Note: The annual SIBOS conference of the SWIFT financial messaging and services cooperative, at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2, will feature debates, keynote addresses, panel discussions and special interest sessions targeting many issues of concern to financial services firms engaged in post-trade securities operations. There will be chances to dive into the latest on custodian and asset servicing, corporate actions processing, collateral management, SWIFT’s role in the Legal Entity Identifier standards initiative, SWIFT and U.S. sanctions against Russian firms, and even SWIFT’s new Know Your Customer Registry. As SIBOS was approaching, FTF News took the opportunity to check in with six key vendors attending SIBOS to find out what SWIFT-related areas are important to them. Their edited responses follow in alphabetical order by company name.30Fundtech, Per Trifunovic, CEO, Fundtech BBP service bureauQ What SWIFT-related product trends have you seen among your clients for this year?A Connectivity: Banks and corporations continue to grapple with the best way to achieve interbank connections and apply the transaction-related applications they need to increase operational efficiency and reduce the risk related to sending and receiving financial messages.Compliance and anti-money-laundering: Our customers continue to look for state-of-the-art compliance filter solutions to help them meet the requirements of the many national and international embargo and anti-money-laundering laws and regulations.Message transformation: Banks still struggle to effectively onboard corporate clients, convert between proprietary message formats and standard formats, and convert between standard-to-standard formats like MT to MX.Q Why do you think these trends are underway?A Customer demand and competitive pressures are demanding payment transformations of all sorts. That said, the scale, complexity and criticality of such projects are fraught with challenges at each stage. In order to mitigate project, operational risk, reputational and financial risk, it is imperative that firms do their due diligence and adopt the right connectivity solution for them.Information Mosaic, Vikas Sahni, head of product management and presalesQ What SWIFT-related product trends have you seen among your clients for this year?A The ISO 15022 adoption wave has passed. The flaws, particularly the non-extendibility and inability to capture all the relevant information in a structured format, are well- recognized by the industry.A new trend in Asia-Pacific saw a major exchange implement a solution providing corporate actions information directly from the issuers in a standardized format, including ISO 20022. Another large exchange and a national depository are working on similar initiatives, while earlier this year a central depository became the first major securities market infrastructure to use ISO 20022 for end-to-end settlement.Because of the benefits offered by the newer ISO 20022 format, it is gaining in popularity in all the new industry initiatives as it solves some of the issues in ISO 15022. However, the tangible benefits of moving entirely to ISO 20022 have always been questionable.In the U.S., the DTCC is two years into adopting the ISO 20022 format for communication as part of its corporate action re-engineering initiative, with the corporate action instruction messages now available in ISO 20022 format.In Europe, TARGET2-Securities has adopted ISO 20022 as the communication protocol for all securities processing messaging. We currently don’t see a demand for support of this format by our custodian client base, but this could change once the industry sees the benefits.FALL 2014 | FTF NEWS MAGAZINE