UN CEFACT TBG5

UN/CEFACT TBG5 is the entity responsible for financial services under the United Nations Centre for Trade facilitation and Electronic Business, (UN/CEFACT) under the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).

As an International Trade & Business Processes Group (TBG), TBG5 is the working group specializing in the Finance Domain its mission is to enable end-to-end straight-through processing (End to End (E2E) Straight Through Processing (STP) of financial services data and to establish standards and requirements for the exchange of such data.

TBG5 delivers solutions and standards that lead to the simplification of international trade. With finance forming an integral and vital part of many trade transactions the group is widely consulted by the other industry vertical domains under the UN/CEFACT umbrella who are pursuing similar objectives.

TBG5 is positioned as the co-ordination point between pure Financial Services standardisation, which takes place under ISO Technical Committee 68, and that of the wider trade domains represented under UN/CEFACT. The key objective in this respect is to offer interoperability, and indeed in the longer term convergence, between standards and solutions offered by either of these bodies. TBG5 has become more Corporate oriented by broadening out its membership to attract other industry vertical groupings, making TBG5 the focal forum allowing banks, corporates and others to collaborate on standards issues.

UN/CEFACT

UN/CEFACT is an organisation that makes international EDI Electronic Data Interchange standards for electronic trade documents in XML format.

History, A UN mission to support trade

UN/CEFACT has its roots in United Nations (UN) missions in trade support. Starting in the 1940s and also forms the UNECE based on the issue "make trade not war!" and making nations more dependent on each other and limit the risk of war (making war more expensive).

At start paper customs forms were standardised to make them readable even if they were issued "in the wrong language".

A previous project during the 1980s was the EDIFACT project of international EDI Electronic Data Interchange standard.

Electronic trade documents

At start by the end of last millennium there was a need of getting more modern and easier applicable electronic trade documents for international information interchange between trade administrative systems. The modern XML technology gave the opportunity to develop many new types of computer tools and technologies to handle administrative business and trade data. Especially the SMEs (Small and medium enterprises) were more or less technically closed out of the EDIFACT not being designed for them. The growing ambitions of e-government also increased the need for official standards in this work field.