LIXItech

Really Simple Commissions

LIXI watchers will be aware that one way we've been trying to help members successfully implement LIXI-compliant systems is by providing "reference implementations" - i.e. working examples that show how the standards can work in practice. We're not trying to deliver production-ready systems, just assets that demonstrate practical implementation approaches to guide or assist member's own IT teams.

The first real example of this strategy was the Valuations Reference Implementation developed for us by our friends at NICTA. Another initiative that's underway now is the Visible Loans Project, again with NICTA, that is aimed at demonstrating how a Publish/Subscribe model of data dissemination can be faster, simpler and cheaper than traditional point-to-point connections.

Now we have a third initiative underway and I reckon it's a really juicy one. LIXI has teemed up with Microsoft to demonstrate that a practical and useful implementation of the LIXI Commissions standard can be rapidly achieved with absolutely minimal disruption to existing tools and processes. The key word here is "rapidly". We aim to complete the project by Christmas, and fervently hope that this will then enable some major lender and broker groups to have the Commissions standard in production use early in 2008. By past standards this is wildly ambitious, but on paper it looks eminently do-able...and you never know if you don't have a go.

BTW, while we are partnering with Microsoft on this the project will most definitely NOT be Microsoft-specific. In fact a key project goal for the Microsofties is to demonstrate just how well they function in a standards-based world. Personally I've long viewed Microsoft as the Evil Empire but I have to admit I've been impressed with what I've seen so far.

Anyhow, project kick-off is next Wednesday. If you're interested but somehow missed the meeting announcement feel free to send me an email and I'll pass on the meeting details.

NECS steps

Pardon the pathetic pun. Couldn't resist it.

As I mentioned a few posts back, the LIXI Working Group on electronic conveyancing data standards (the NECS Working Group) will be open to all LIXI members from the WG's next meeting. I suggested that anyone interested in participating should make sure they read all the background doco from the NECS site but there's one more document you really should read. Download necs_requirements_definition_v5_060607.pdf This doesn't have "official" status yet and can be expected to change over time but it's well worth taking the time to read carefully.

If you do happen to read it carefully, and not fall asleep halfway through, I can guarantee you'll be one of the better informed people at the next WG meeting :-) I often find a glass of red can really help when faced by a daunting document, but there's something about the NECS doco that seems to require whole bottles...

Big Day Out

Our inaugural LIXI Industry Forum has come and gone and all I can say is, wow, what a day. I've presented at a lot of conferences over the years but that was definitely up with the best. It was particularly great to see so many people so passionate about all the things that LIXI needs to do better - passion means people care and, to be honest, I've been a little worried that after seven years of hard slog we could have fatigue issues. But I reckon LIXI can now justly claim to have made it to the status of "core industry infrastructure". All we have to do now is make it really good core industry infrastructure. Needless to say I have plenty of opinions about how to do that, and I'll be writing about some of those ideas here over coming weeks.

While I'm talking about the Industry Forum I have to mention the stellar job done by Andrew Stabback and his crew from InAssociation. LIXI's democratic (i.e. fractious and argumentative) nature makes it a hard beast to steer towards a single goal like the Forum and they handled it like master cat herders. Bravo.

Electronic Conveyancing - it's time to get involved

LIXI and NECO (the National Electronic Conveyancing Office) have been collaborating to develop the message standards needed to support a national electronic conveyancing system. A NECDS (National Electronic Conveyancing Data Standards) Working Group has been established just like any other LIXI working group and online requirements documentation is evolving rapidly in Pageseeder. The difference to date has been that the Working Group has been limited to representatives from the various State and Territory land registries. This hasn't been because there are any big secrets involved - we* just wanted to get established before we invite all and sundry to join in (in other words, we wanted to get to the point where we look like we know what we are doing :-) ).

Anyhow, from the next NECDS Working Group meeting onwards all LIXI members will be welcome to come along to observe and contribute their thoughts on how the various message standards should look. This is a great opportunity for the people who will eventually have to use NECS (i.e. you lot) to both learn about how it will work and to make sure that how it works fits with how they want it to work.

I do strongly suggest, however, that you read up thoroughly on the background documentation before you try to join the conversation. There is a lot available to read and I guarantee that 9 out of 10 questions you may have can be answered from the doco. Check out the documentation section of the NECS website for a cornucopia of informative reading matter.

If you are interested in participating you can go into Pageseeder to subscribe yourself to the NECS Working Group mailing list. That way you will automatically be notified when we schedule the next WG meeting.

* I'm saying "we" here because I'm the NECDS Working Group convener - Barry.

Visible Loans

The LIXI Visible Loans Project is a joint venture with NICTA that is looking at the potential for distributing lending information like a news feed - i.e. publishing information that other parties can subscribe to. This approach doesn't make sense for point-to-point links (e.g. brokers submitting loan applications to lenders) but it makes plenty of sense for anything that is broadcast, such as product information. Instead of every lender having to establish a product update connection to all of their brokers, they could just add the product news feed to their existing broker websites and the brokers could simply subscribe to whichever lender news feeds they're interested in. Way simpler, cheaper and faster. And potentially applicable to other lending processes as well - even backchannel and commissions data could potentially be distributed via news feeds generated dynamically in response to queries from securely identified brokers. The key point is that anything distributed as a news feed doesn't need hand-crafted web service connections.

Because working examples make even great ideas easier to understand the Visible Loans Project is creating a reference implementation in much the same way that we created a reference implementation of the Valuations standard. This will again be freely available to all LIXI members and is due for completion by the end of 2007. In the meantime a white paper is under development to describe the what, why and how of the project. An early draft can be downloaded here if you are curious - Download LIXIPubSub_v0.7.pdf.

But the best way to get a good look at Visible Loans will be to attend the presentation at the LIXI Industry Forum next week (3:50pm in the technical stream).

Guidelines for LIXI implementations

Since LIXI started in 2000 we've struggled a bit with the question of just how much guidance LIXI should provide on how to exchange messages (as opposed to defining what the messages should contain, which has always been our primary focus). Our thinking has always been that (a) the "messaging layer" stuff was being sorted out elsewhere so we should stick to our knitting and let the market evolve and settle on the best approaches, and (b) the IT departments of the big lenders will never do what LIXI tells them to anyhow, so why even try. All fair enough I reckon, but we still get recurring requests for LIXI to provide more guidance on how LIXI data should be exchanged - and clearly we'd all be better off if there was one commonly accepted solution.

We do have an "Implementation Guide" but it's several years old now and an attempt earlier this year to look at updating it foundered on the problem of deciding just what LIXI could do that would actually be useful. It remains true that the purely technical question of how messages should be exchanged is outside LIXI's core competence and is almost certainly better defined elsewhere. So in an ideal world it would be great if we could just adopt someone else's fully developed messaging specifications - preferably something tailored to the needs of financial services (i.e. plenty of attention to security, and strong support for exchanging supporting documents as well as XML data).

Given what I just wrote it won't surprise you to hear that I have something in mind. The ACORD standards for insurance in the US are an impressive piece of work covering a huge range of transactions. They are well proven in widespread use and, needless to say, ACORD has addressed many of the same problems that we face. Of particular interest in this context is their, "ACORD Messaging Service XML Specification and SOAP Implementation Guide". This spec is written to be largely content-agnostic - which means it shouldn't matter if the payload is an ACORD message or a LIXI one. So my thinking is that we could do a lot worse than just adopting ACORD messaging as the recommended framework for LIXI messaging. Apart from anything else it could give us a useful level of interoperability with the insurance industry!

I've had some exposure to ACORD lately via some involvement in an initiative to bring the ACORD standards to Australia. Mostly this is of only peripheral interest to LIXI (though I note that we have had recent requests to look at adding support for home and contents insurance to CAL) but the messaging part could be exactly what we need.

If anyone has thoughts or opinions on this I'd love to hear them - so I draw your attention to the "Comments" link below...

NECDS

For those not in the know, NECDS stands for National Electronic Conveyancing Data Standards i.e. the data standards required to support NECS, the National Electronic Conveyancing System. These standards are being developed as a joint effort by NECS, the various State land registries, and LIXI. This is an important project for many reasons, but from LIXI's perspective one of the biggest reasons for being involved is to ensure that we end up with a common language for the entire loan process "from soup to nuts". The ultimate goal is to enable data such as a borrower's name in the loan application to be re-used, across multiple systems without having to be re-entered, all the way through to creating and lodging the mortgage.

Anyhow...today we had the second meeting of the NECDS Working Group and I'm happy to say we're genuinely getting a lot done. While trying to come up with a single standard to talk to eight different State and Territory land registries looks scary complicated at first the parallels with the process we went through to create LIXI CAL are very strong. By which I mean that once you've resolved the naming differences the underlying data set is both simpler and more universal than it looked to start with.

I'll admit I'm probably a little odd in the head, but I really enjoy big, juicy problems like NECDS. In comparison work like, for instance, the AML mods to CAL just isn't as engaging. Unquestionably important, but relatively administrative with little room or need for creativity.

Progress (yes I said progress) on Products

The Products Working Group met again today to go through the draft Products schema put forward by Erik Fenna. A number of changes resulted but overall I think the feeling was that we had a workable solution. We'll be meeting again next week to try to push this long, long running saga to a close.

On a less positive note, the Products marathon appears to have burnt off most of the working group participants. There are only a handful of members still actively involved and this is a problem because the majority of LIXI members will have their first exposure to the new standard once it's released and they're trying to implement. Experience shows that at this point many will suddenly realise that in fact they do have specific and essential requirements that they want included in the standard - and as a result we will end up having to do Products 1.1 much sooner than I'd like. A very wasteful outcome.

Please, if you think that automated, standardised updating of product data to brokers is something you could be interested in you owe it to yourself to get involved now and review the draft before it's too late.