Re: Thanks to all and next steps

Hi Joseph,

As I suspected might happen there is a lot of debate from what now appears
to be a majority who are actually all in agreement.

You said: "the W3C WP IG should explicitly accept that there are existing
legitimate and useful global standards, principles and model laws in the
domains of money, payments and e-commerce that the WP WG really ought to
just accept as boundary conditions for its own work". I think that what
Nick, David Jackson and I have all been saying is exactly that.

The group intends to consider other standards in as much as we should not
have a Web standard that is obstructive to other domain specific standards
HOWEVER we don't want to prescribe that any other standard is a dependancy
of the Web standard.

In trying to produce a standard that meets this criteria we will produce a
Web standard that simply defines the interfaces in and out of the Web
context (usually via a browser API) and a message envelope for the
interactions at those interfaces that is capable of supporting any payment
scheme specific messaging.

If the process before and after this flow is defined by UBL or the scheme
that is ultimately used between the two parties defines a set of ISO20022
message formats for it's messaging then that is fine and the WG should
attempt to define the Web standard in such a way that as many of these
cases are possible.

My personal perspective:

As far as I can tell, there are no use cases in scope for v1 that suggest
an payment scheme using ISO20022 so perhaps following all of this there is
a job of work for someone familiar with the standard to identify one that
should be included. (And I would suggest that these fit within the scope of
what is already generally agreed today and not vastly exotic new cases like
securities exchanges or the like)

On the contrary, as I pointed out before, the VAST majority of payments via
the browser today use cards as their instrument and to my knowledge that
means they ultimately travel on the card networks which last I checked all
use ISO8583. That doesn't mean that to do payments in the browser you need
to be able to integrate into an ISO8583 network directly or that a Web
standard should be dependent on it either.

Payments online generally happen through payment intermediaries (banks or
gateways) who take responsibility for putting transactions that originate
on the Web into the financial networks that are required to process them. I
certainly see no change to this in the near future so if the world moves to
ISO20022 instead of ISO8583 for card then that is work for the gateways and
banks to do to change their back-end. A well designed Web standard would be
entirely unaffected by this change.

Again, my personal opinion: The Web is VERY unlikely to adopt ISO20022 as a
messaging standard for anything. It is far more likely to define a unified
interface between the Web context (where messages are passed around in JSON
and occasionally still XML) and an external context (such as that defined
by a payment scheme). If it is designed well, that interface will
accommodate all of the existing schemes (and the standards they have
adopted) and leave room for schemes we are yet to discover.

In all honesty, I think a great deal of what we are now debating over falls
in the scope of Web Settlement. That may sound like a recruiting effort but
I think it is true. The work of the PAWG in v1 is going to centre around
fixing the browser experience for a the B2C use cases predominantly (and
P2P hopefully). When we start talking about connecting payment networks and
a Web standard for direct movement of value between entities (which may
mean direct normative reference to ISO20022) then we are outside that
groups scope in my opinion.

On 26 June 2015 at 22:12, Joseph Potvin <jpotvin@opman.ca> wrote:

> RE: "Do you think we need to resolve this question before we launch a WG?"
>
> I should mention I sent my previous message "Might we agree on the
> following statement?" just prior to seeing your post "This Interest Group
> does not need to resolve today..."
>
> This thread has been over-the-top busy, but I reckon it's because the core
> issue here is pivotal. I'm not sure how widely that's felt. But Ian, you
> clarified some key parameters in your post "On references from W3C
> specifications..."  The discussion about ISO 20022 is just a 'case in
> point' within those broader strategic considerations.  Hence to your
> question "Do people think that would be an improvement to the draft
> charter?"  -- I suggest the issue is not ISO 20022 in particular.
>
> If "this question" has to do with whether the W3C WP IG should explicitly
> accept that there are existing legitimate and useful global standards,
> principles and model laws in the domains of money, payments and e-commerce
> that the WP WG really ought to just accept as boundary conditions for its
> own work, then yes, my sense is that this does very much need to get
> resolved prior to launch. I understand that I have no authority in the
> matter -- I'm just answering your question of what I think.
>
> I piped up because this seems very important -- much discussion took place
> on the same general strategic matter during some of the breakout sessions
> of the US Fed's Faster Payment Task Force meeting.
>
> To overlook or to sidestep existing legitimate and useful global technical
> standards, global system principles and global model laws in the domains of
> money, payments and e-commerce wastes time and effort, since those existing
> sources do elegantly accommodate what the W3C seeks to accomplish. Why boil
> the financial ocean to make a cup of Web espresso?
>
> Anyways, I'll make this my last post on this topic for the time being
> (unless asked a question).  :-)
>
> Joseph Potvin
> On behalf of DataKinetics http://www.dkl.com
> Operations Manager | Gestionnaire des opérations
> The Opman Company | La compagnie Opman
> jpotvin@opman.ca
> Mobile: 819-593-5983
>
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 3:04 PM, Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> > On Jun 26, 2015, at 1:55 PM, Joseph Potvin <jpotvin@opman.ca> wrote:
>> >
>> > Nick, Might we agree on the following statement?   "ISO 20022
>> standardizes only a message 'scheme' without specifying the various message
>> types, because messages are transitory and they evolve with the diversity
>> of payment systems in operation. For convenience the ISO 20022 community
>> maintains a catalogue of message types structured according to the ISO
>> 20022 standard. However that catalogue is not intrinsic to the standard."
>> >
>> > Are you recommending that the IG's work should not even accept any
>> dependence upon the financial industry's messaging scheme (or compatible)?
>>
>> Joseph,
>>
>> I *think* we may be down in the weeds at this point.
>>
>> Do you think we need to resolve this question before we launch a WG? Or
>> can we ask the WG to make the determination based
>> on what they perceive is necessary for interoperability?
>>
>> Ian
>>
>> --
>> Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>      http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
>> Tel:                       +1 718 260 9447
>>
>>
>>
>>
>