Treasury and Trade Solutions
Case study

British Council
Citi uses MyStandards to reduce ISO 20022 XML testing timeline by half
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational
opportunities. Founded in 1934 as the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries,
it was later granted a royal charter by King George VI in 1940.

Challenge
Facing an increase in businessvolumes and the complexity of
having to maintain multiple banking
interfaces with large numbers ofaccounts, the British Council wantedto rationalise its banking relationships
and increase automation andconsistency and reduce risk andoperating costs in the process. WithCiti as its main banking partner, theorganisation decided to embark on
an ambitious project to open new
accounts in nine countries, implement
the ISO 20022 XML standard andcomplete its bank integration projectin less than three months.
Solution
Consulting with the British Council,
Citi proposed that it adopt SWIFT’sMyStandards Readiness Portal — acloud-based customer onboarding
and testing tool — so that it could
share Citi formatting guidelines ineasy-to-use interactive environmentand start file structure and content
validation testing — in parallel with
its planned account-opening process.
A dedicated testing portal was“Citi’s support of SWIFT’s
My Standards proved tobe highly efficient for us.
With our developers having
online access to Citi’s
payment and formatting
rules, development andtesting was very rapid.”
therefore created for the BritishCouncil, meeting required guidelines,complete with comprehensive
training. The cloud-based service
required no installation and gave
both organisations full visibility
over and transparency of testing
progress. Its intuitive UI allowed
users to get started immediately.

Council Treasury Operations
Manager Richard Symonds: “Citi’s
support of SWIFT’s My Standards
proved to be highly efficient forus. With our developers having
online access to Citi’s payment
and formatting rules, development
and testing was very rapid.”
The interactive features of theportal enable real-time debugging
with unlimited testing iterations.
“As a result,” Symonds adds, “ourfirst test files sent to Citi were
processed without issue and wecompleted the project on time”,
highlighting the collaborative natureof a solution that enabled the Citi
implementation team to monitor
testing progress and offer timely
advice to compress overall testing.

ResultThe solution allowed the British
Council to start file testing even
before accounts were opened,
and compressed testing timelines
by 50%. In the words of British

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