[apps-discuss] Proposal for a Finance Area Mailing List

[Walter <[e-mail]>]

Hi there.

This message is posted at the request of the Application Area Managers
as the culmination of email interaction dating back to December 15,
2011.

We seek the establishment of a mailing list for the discussion of
financial area protocols.

Recently Payward Inc. authored two drafts:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-iiban/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-imic/

The drafts propose means for financial endpoint identification and
financial market identification. They are of wide potential interest
for alternate financial networking, however they are missing a
critical and complex reason to deploy them widely, which is an
inter-institutional protocol for transaction quotation, negotiation,
reporting and state management.

A possible solution in this area will be presented in an upcoming
draft, essentially seeking to provide a mechanism to replace
established protocols (ISO20022, FIX) with an open, non-legacy
alternative with adequate flexibility to support emerging digital
financial networks.  To illustrate, the problem statement for the as
yet unpublished draft is as follows.

============================================================
  Certain functionality required by modern financial systems is not
  presently available in open, legacy-free, adequately globalized
  protocols.

  This functionality includes:
   * Settlement and reversal / cancellation term negotiation
   * Exchange rate negotiation
   * Latency calculation / negotiation
   * Fee, tax and discount calculation / negotiation
   * Arbitrary currency / asset support
   * Multi-currency / asset transaction support
   * Quotation support
   * Multiple settlement path support
   * Optional support for in-band settlement (sometimes known as DVP)
   * High precision decimal value support
   * Arbitrary financial settlement topology support
   * Arbitrary communications topology support

  Given this situation, it makes sense to propose a legacy-free,
  adequately extensible protocol for internet-based financial exchange.
============================================================

In addition to our own work above, most of you are probably aware of
some of the various other efforts going on in the financial world.
These efforts include mobile finance, digital currencies and
settlement systems, private currency markets, new transaction
protocols, scalable non fiat-currency based community-centric
transaction systems, and other projects.  A few examples:
 - Bitcoin: http://bitcoin.org/
 - CES: http://ces.org.za/
 - Ripple: http://ripple-project.org/
 - W3C Web Payments: http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/

At this stage some discussions have already occurred in public forums
with reference to the drafts that Payward Inc. has published and the
potential for a greater community involvement in exploring potential
solutions:
 http://bit.ly/v6n2tk (The Bitcoin Trader)
 http://bit.ly/xpMxQ3 (Bitcoin Development list)
 http://bit.ly/zpVHms (Ripple Users)

Unfortunately, due to the project-oriented nature of each of these
forums it is difficult to focus on issues that exceed individual
project scope either affect or have the potential to affect the wider
internet community. Therefore Iwebelieve that it would be useful to
try to draw representatives of the various projects together to
discuss such issues via a mailing list hosted at the IETF, with the
goal to discuss and develop solutions to problems in established and
emerging financial networks.  The IETF specifically can provide:

 1. Transparency and community examination of a proven standards
development process
 2. Access to IANA: an established, internationally credible third
party for registry management (very useful to build trust in alternate
financial systems)
 3. Access to functional, supplementary services such as document distribution.

We therefore request the establishment of a financial area mailing list.

Feedback and statements of interest are hereby requested.

Regards,
Walter Stanish
Payward Inc.