[October 26, 2001] The Treasury Workstation Integration Standards Team (TWIST) "drives initiatives to achieve interoperability and defines standards between corporate treasury operations and their banks. TWIST is a working group of several companies formed and led by the treasury operations department of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group that is focused on creating standards to facilitate an open dealing marketplace for foreign exchange (FX). The companies involved will drive initiatives to achieve interoperability and standards between corporate treasury operations and their banks, enabling the efficient and controlled integration of treasury solutions with financial marketplaces.

Companies involved with TWIST: Royal Dutch/Shell Group's treasury operations department, alterna Technologies Group, Inc., Barclays Capital, Currenex, Inc., Integrity Treasury Solutions, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Reuters, Richmond Software, SAP, Selkirk Financial Technologies, SimCorp, tapX, Trema, Wall Street Systems, and XRT.

TWIST deliverables:

"As a first delivery, TWIST has issued in May 2001 a document specifying FX trade XML data types, representing the consensus on how the data elements will be included in the message transfer to electronic trading platforms for FX trades. The document has built on the work done by others, adding further elements TWIST like: trade requests, incorporation of multiple trade participants, non-bank counterparty identification and settlement information. This standards proposal had been aligned with FpML (Financial products Markup Language), the business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial products. This first output of TWIST has been considered by and is being incorporated in its own specifications by the FpML FX Products Working Group, the group responsible for extending the product definition of the current FpML standard to accommodate the use of FpML for FX products, whilst ensuring full utilization of the existing language."

In September 2001, TWIST has issued a second version of an open standard interface. This second version includes detailed instructions for foreign exchange trading, including trade and settlement confirmation. It further includes the following trade events: (1) New trades (2) Collection of trades (3) Amendments (4) Cancellations (5) Close outs (6) Allocations (7) Forward rolls (8) Aggregation (9) Split settlements. This version has also been aligned with the work done by FpML and is again being considered for incorporation by the FpML FX Products Working Group.

TWIST is aiming to deliver before the end of 2001 further versions of its open standards interface, covering the following areas: (1) Compliance and controls [Credit controls, Dealer authorisations, Tradable instruments]; (2) User Authentication; (3) Trade / Settlement confirmation; (4) Workflow processing Payments; (5) Workflow processing Advises to Receipt; (6) Accounting and audit reporting. TWIST is working on further alignment with SWIFT and a range of banks that play a dominant role in providing settlement services with regard to the confirmation and settlement processes. After delivery of a broad range of standards for the trading and execution of FX transactions, TWIST aims to broaden its scope to other cash market instruments, starting with loans and deposits.

Focus: "Initially, TWIST has focused on two main areas of functionality: producing a working standard for uploading trades to be executed from supporting systems to a trading platform and for capturing foreign exchange trading details from a trading platform in internal treasury management systems. In May 2001, a first standard was issued; the details of this proposal were delivered to and are being used by the FpML FX products working group. Several TMS vendors have already come close to incorporation of the TWIST standards in their systems. Deal uploads and deal capture will provide a first level of integration that allows for a more efficient process for both customers and their banks, but do not provide seamless straight through processing. Firstly, trades do not only consist of single deals that will never be altered or amended. Full STP requires, for instance, support for: amendments, cancellations, allocations, rolls, and aggregations. Secondly, for trades to be settled automatically, controls need to be in place to ensure authorised trading within predefined limitations. Since workstations are used to register static data and check compliance to dealer and credit limits, this would only require the TMS to provide fully authorised and verified deals to the trading platform."

References:

• TWIST web site
• TWIST XML DTD. 2001-10-22. [cache]
• TWIST XML DTD, HTML format. [cache]
• Treasury Workstation Integration: Comparison of Twist to current FpML-fx. By Bill Specht, Financial Software Architect. October 22, 2001. 22 pages. This document presents a comparison of the two standards TWIST-FX and FpML-FX. [cache]
• TWIST data models:
  • TWIST Trade
  • TWIST FX product. The product layer for spot, forwards and swaps
  • TWIST FX Option. The product layer for options
  • TWIST Currency Flow
  • TWIST settlement Information
• TWIST deliverables
• TWIST members
• [October 17, 2001] Currenex and Wall Street Systems Exhibit STP Interface at The Association For Financial Professionals Conference." - "Currenex, Inc. will exhibit straight-through processing using an interface developed jointly by Currenex and Wall Street Systems at the Association for Financial Professionals Conference (AFP). This interface will allow users of The Wall Street System electronic Treasury Information Exchange (eTIE) platform to automatically receive trade and settlement details from Currenex's FXtrades multi-bank currency exchange via the eTIE platform. The interface is based upon the TWIST standard, which both Wall Street Systems and Currenex have helped develop. Attendees at the conference will see straight-through processing between Currenex's online foreign exchange service, FXtrades, and The Wall Street System eTIE platform. FXtrades is a real-time foreign exchange platform that provides a total trading solution from initiation and execution to settlement and reporting. eTIE is a guaranteed-delivery, Internet-connectivity solution for connecting B2B exchanges with back office and risk systems used by the treasury departments of the world's major corporations. Once a user executes a deal on the Currenex service, the integrated solution will automatically update the user's trading position and handle all operational processes within The Wall Street System..."