Purpose

There are a variety of standards for representing financial products. Often it will be necessary to convert between one standard and another to implement a specific business process. GemConvert solves this problem by providing a general-purpose framework for converting between FpML and other XML-based financial standards where possible, such as

• CSV (comma separated value) or other flat file formats
• FIXML
• ISO 15022 WG10 XML

Templates used to configure GemConvert.

Description

GemConvert is a meta-data driven framework for converting between FpML and other XML formats. There will be a set of built-in translation formats, and the ability for users to develop additional ones.

Planned Features

• Configurable metadata files for FpML and non-FpML formats, created using MS Excel forms with drop down lists.
• Automated enumerated value conversion logic
• XSLT-based conversion templates for complex conversion logic.
• Ability to support non-FpML formats as well as FpML.

Applications

• Feeds to/from in-house and third party systems using
• flat file formats
• FIXML
• SWIFT XML
• DTCC XML
• Developing custom conversions between FpML and proprietary XML formats.

Technology

• Several implementations are planned.
• There will be an Excel VBA implementation for CSV files
• The main implementations will use XSLT and Perl.

Quality Assurance

• Automated consistency checks will be developed to compare schemas with the conversion metadata files.
• A large set of test cases will be developed for each supported conversion to ensure reliable conversion.

Status and Plan

An alpha version for converting from CSV files and proprietary XML formats into FpML currently exists and is in testing.

This is planned to be integrated with GemVault and turned into areleased product during Q3/Q4 of 2003.