AW: ISO 20022

[Geert Janssens]

On woensdag 12 april 2017 07:45:18 CEST gnucash at junix.ch wrote:
> > > I wanted to ask if here is any plan for GNUcash to support ISO20022? Did
> > > anybody already dig into it?> 
> > I've never even heard of it.
> 
I hadn't heard of it either so I googled it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20022 suggests it's a standard for 
electroninc data interchange between financial institutions. https://
www.iso20022.org/faq.page suggests it is also meant for communication between 
financial institutions and their clients.

> Haha! And once again, the so-called international standard turns out to be
> more a European standard 😊.

According to the wikipedia article above it's really intended to be global, 
not European only. And apparently the US' Federal Reserve System recommended 
in 2015 to push for adoption as well.

> > What banks that you do business with have implemented it?
> 
> Actually the Swiss payment infrastructure is in a adoption phase since fall
> 2016 and expects a transition phase until 2018. This is all major banks
> such as PostFinance, UBS, CreditSuisse, etc. personally I do business with
> Raiffeisen which is also pushing for it.
> > Is it implemented as a file download (so that one would use File>Import)
> > or as part of an online session (requiring AQBanking support to work in
> > GnuCash)?
> It seems the standard is aiming at both. My particular use case is file up-
> and download. As I said already: I did not dig into it yet, but I would
> volunteer to look into this topic (at least the "offline" import and
> probably export part) myself. However I wanted to do a first call to check
> whether this is already on someone's radar as I'm not a friend of
> duplication.

That would be a great way to contribute !
> 
> I'll count your reply as a "at least John Ralls does not have this on his
> radar". 😊

As I hadn't heard of it either yet, it's obviously not on my list either.
> 
> To my best knowledge, ISO20022 is not too far from/similar to SEPA which
> seems to be part of AqBanking already. Therefor I'm not sure whether the
> offline stuff could or should come as part of AqBanking or if a stand-alone
> solution would be acceptable.

AqBanking provides offline import for several formats like ofx, mt940 and so 
on. So you definitely could add ISO 20022 support in aqbanking on that level.

From my very light investigation I read the relation between ISO 20022 and 
SEPA sligthly differently: the way I understand it ISO 2022 is "a standard to 
define standards", so pretty generic and wide in scope. SEPA on the other hand 
is one standard defined using the ISO 20022 definition scheme. I don't know 
whether this is also reflected as such in aqbanking. So you'll have to check 
for yourself whether the SEPA implementation in aqbanking would be a good 
starting point for your ISO 20022 work.

Good luck !

Geert