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 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