{{third-party, date=April 2015 Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards Team (Twist) is a

not-for-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

industry standards group. It does not charge anything for involvement. The main goal of Twist is to create non-proprietary XML message standards for the financial services industry. To this end it provides a message format validation service. Its focus on financial transaction processing covers the aspects of: * Payments and collections (on invoices to suppliers and from customers) * Cash management (cash flow, position keeping across accounts and timing) * Working capital finance (short term investment of spare cash to make gains) * Wholesale financial market access (raising capital through stocks and bonds) The focus of these combined standards is to create and improve straight-through processing (STP). As any STP system of systems will invariably involve many market participants such standards are essential for success. Twist provides a check-list for ensuring STP is implemented in accordance with its standards. The word ‘standards’ is used rather than protocols as Twist endeavours to also define business process best practices. Such practices are typically implemented in a workflow, or

business process management Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business ...

system (BPMS). Considerable emphasis is placed on how to handle exceptions so that as much traffic can be handled automatically with as little as possible going to manual intervention. One major standard introduced by TWIST is the Bank Services Billing Standard (BSB).

Parties involved

The leading party in Twist is the

Royal Dutch Shell Shell plc is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. Shell is a public limited company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New ...

Group’s corporate treasury department, giving the Twist standards more of a corporate finance perspective as opposed to a

banking A bank is a financial institution that accepts Deposit account, deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital m ...

perspective. Participants in Twist come from across the broad supply chain of banking and its support industries. A common role for Twist is to draw on expertise in corporate treasury and channel it to software vendors so that they can create the products required. Geographically Twist has good traction in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

and the

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

. It has momentum in the foreign exchange (FX) and fixed income (FI) and money markets (MM) asset classes.

Related standards

Related XML financial services standard include FIX, FpML and SWIFT XML. Where related financial services message standards exist, such as these XML standards or classic SWIFT, then Twist aims to leverage them and interoperate with them rather than compete.

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was est ...

is working with Twist, as of May 2005, to tie into its FX trading service (known as the RTFX service). Their aim is to deliver real time trade confirmations directly into corporate treasurer’s STP systems.

External links

TwistReuters works with Twist
Transaction processing XML organizations