In a place like Hong Kong where conference fatigue can be a very real malady, organisers know they’re onto a winning topic when they can pack a theatre with around 500 eager participants for a morning seminar. What you might find surprising is that Sun Microsystems managed to pull these numbers for a seminar on XML, a topic considered by many to be rather unsexy. XML, for the uninitiated, stands for eXtensible Mark-up Language and is a meta-language for describing data shared between applications.
Y.B. Yeung, assistant general manager and head of IT at HSBC, who spoke at the seminar on ‘New IT challenges in the banking industry’ estimated that there were about 80 IT-related bank staff attending, testament to the growing interest in using the mark-up language for applications in the financial industry.
“XML is one of those [languages] that could be ignored in this marketplace, but the industry is positioning itself in e-commerce so XML is something we’re going have to learn pretty quickly, ” he says.
Yeung admits that HSBC currently has no XML projects in development, but says this will soon change. “I see IT as the key success factor these days for a bank. I don’t think a bank can survive without information technology.”
HSBC is currently developing online corporate banking solutions to complement its recently launched retail e-banking, as the bank is well aware that the corporate market is potentially very lucrative.
Some form of XML development will no doubt be needed as part of any corporate banking solution, with many XML-based languages being developed to cater for the more technical, back room aspects of the financial industry. FpML (financial products Mark-up Language), for example, is a joint initiative of JP Morgan and PricewaterhouseCoopers to enable e-commerce activities in the field of financial derivatives. Ultimately, it will allow for the electronic integration of a range of services, but the initial release will focus on interest rate swaps and Forward Rate Agreements (FRAs).
Reasons for delay
The first specifications for XML were published in 1998, but despite its promise it was not widely adopted, due in part to the end-of-millennium timing.
“One of the major reasons for companies not moving into XML earlier was that in 1999 a lot of companies were putting most of their efforts into tackling Y2K, and even continuing into early 2000,” says KT Yung of the Hong Kong Productivity Council. “But then coming into the middle of 2000 everyone is talking about e-commerce and realized, OK, it’s time to look at XML.”
Another reason for apprehension among company decision-makers is the fact that XML is still evolving. A number of sometimes competing initiatives have begun defining separate but related mark-up languages, based on XML, for specific industries and applications.
Microsoft, while involved in some way with the development of many of the languages, has come up with its own form of standardised XML called BizTalk. The UN body for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), an IT industry consortium, have also joined forces to initiate a worldwide project to create Electronic Business XML (ebXML) – a standard that will make XML data understandable across industries and international boundaries.
Companies such as IBM, SWIFT and bolero.net have all also devised XML-based languages to serve various purposes and industries.
This confusing pack has sometimes led to a ‘wait and see’ approach, but as the picture becomes clearer more banks are likely to find practical uses for particular XML-based languages. Doing this successfully in the long-term, however, might require some foresight in picking which of the competing XML-based languages will take off and which will die out.
