LIXItech

Commissions project is up and running

We had the kick-off meeting for the Commissions project yesterday with excellent attendance (CBA, Westpac, St.George, Macquarie Bank, AFG, Mortgage Choice, Aussie, Loanworks, Nextgen, Pisces, LTX, Allette Systems and Microsoft were all there) and gratifying enthusiasm. Pretty excited about this one...

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.

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...