Standards Forum Kicks off With Focus on Co-Operation

Discussions around how the standards space has developed in the past years, enabling co-operation between key players, has been one of the main themes of discussion at the first session of the Standards Forum at Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam.

Speakers emphasized how collaboration, although on the rise, continues to be relatively recent in this space. Gary Probert, managing director and chair of ISITC, said he thinks discussions focusing on the need to collaborate in the standards space really kicked off at Sibos 2007 in Boston. "It all started as part of a casual conversation between a group of us...and now for the very first time it is important to see a lot of different organizations working together in a very collaborative manner," he said.

Mark Bolgiano, president & CEO, XBRL US said that right now it is all about competition, collaboration and coexistence, while Alexandre Kech, head of securities & AI Standards, Swift, said looking forward he expects the standards discussion to focus on the possibility of combining standards and building bridges between them.

Meanwhile, data experts who attended the session said collaboration has yet to go to the next level to ensure the vision around standards is broad and clear enough to tackle the real challenges.