SWIFT Institute

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Smart Contracts (SC) promise to transform automation in the financial industry, and are generating huge interest amongst financial institutions and technology providers. Rapid progress is being made towards more robust implementations of the technology that might meet the needs of the financial industry for security, resilience and scalability. However, regardless of the technology, addressing automation problems in a multi-party network environment also requires business participants to define and agree the meaning and content of shared data, business processes, roles and responsibilities. This is the domain of business standards, and the focus of this paper is the application of business standards to distributed ledger technology. This paper addresses some integral questions about how DLT/SC automation can run smoothly in a multi-party network environment and highlights the importance of avoiding ‘reinventing the wheel’ when it comes to business definitions that facilitate interoperability. The paper recognises that full-scale standardisation of DLT/SC use cases is premature; however, SWIFT stands ready to work with the community to conduct further studies into the reuse of existing business standards in order to better facilitate the efficient workings of DLT/SC technologies for the financial industry as a whole.”