The Development of FEDI in Switzerland: A Life-Cycle Approach
Ivo Cathomen and Stefan Klein
Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1997, pp. 129 – 145.
Abstract: 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 adoption 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. In order to explain the low acceptance rate, we distinguish between the perspectives of the sponsors_that is, the banks_and the adopters_that is, the customers.
Key Words and Phrases: diffusion of EDI, financial EDI, life-cycle theory, substitution of standards.