Distributed Ledgers, Smart Contracts, Business Standards and ISO 20022

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Smart Contracts (SC) promise to transform automation in the financial industry, and are generating huge interest among 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.