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

[Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>]

Apps-Discuss folks: It's been about a week since Walter posted this,
and no one's commented.  Perhaps that means that no one's  interested,
but I'd like to stir the pot a bit and see whether anyone has anything
to say.  Nudge-nudge, stir-stir.

Walter, what we're looking for here is some public discussion that
results in at least some reasonable level of understanding about what
would be discussed on the mailing list you propose, who might be
interested in participating and, importantly, what IETF work might
come out of it.  I'll note that standardization doesn't only happen in
the IETF; there other standards organizations with different foci, and
industry consortia often form to develop special-purpose standards for
limited industry subgroups.  What you want here might not be a bunch
of Internet gearheads who worry about SMTP, HTTP, SIP, MPLS, and BGP,
but, rather, some techies involved in the finance industry who can
better develop something that really meets the need you have.

That's not an answer one way or the other, but a call for conversation
and analysis, and some seeds to start the discussion.

Barry, AppsAWG chair and incoming App AD

On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 10:31 AM, Walter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 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 yet unpublished draft is as follows.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.
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