The Development of FEDI in Switzerland: A Life-Cycle Approach

Four major Swiss banks have recently introduced a new financial electronic data interchange (FEDI) service based on UN/EDIFACT and are now trying to convince their corporate customers to migrate from the Swiss banking standard DTA to EDIFACT. So far with little success. Along with the take-up of EDIFACT the banks have not only switched the message standard but also the governance form with respect to the provision of services. We want to give a stylized summary of the development of different generations of electronic banking solutions with a particular emphasis on technological attributes, such as functional properties and message standards, and discuss the strategic rationale of different governance forms chosen for the distribution of these services. From a theoretical point of view, a life cycle concept is applied to describe the development paths of the different systems generations and to scrutinize substitution processes.