Criterion is a not-for-profit company that provides professional Standards and Governance services to the UK’s financial services industry. It has been providing the backbone for the exchange and movement of data between organisations for nearly 30 years, driving cross-industry engagement, and helping organisations achieve higher levels of collaboration, reduce costs and achieve better outcomes for their customers.

 

Criterion has over 80 Standards, which are relied on by more than 100 providers of protection, pensions, retirement, equity release and investment products, and will be launching DFM Standards in 2023. It’s API Standards support more than half a billion business-critical quotation and valuation transactions each year, whilst over the last decade it’s Common Declarations have helped take more than 400,000 years’ worth of delays out of pension transfers.

 

API technologies have contributed to an explosion in data integration, making it easier and quicker to accelerate business processes by getting the right data to the right place at the right time; and technologies like JSON and OpenAPI have made development and deployment of APIs simpler than ever. But that doesn’t mean that duplication and waste have become any more desirable: it’s still quicker and more cost effective to build a service once and deploy it with many trading partners than it is to rebuild and refine it time after time to meet their differing needs.

 

That’s where Criterion Standards come in. Criterion’s unique approach to collaboration, refined and proven  delivers solutions that are specified, designed and approved by subject-matter experts from across the industry. All of that industry expertise is baked into API Standards, giving organisations confidence that Standards- based integration will be straightforward to implement with trading partners and will fit the need that it is designed for. The result is that an API build can be deployed with many trading partners, cutting out wasteful redevelopment.

 

Criterion, along with TeX, also manages STAR, a new award scheme to tackle the amount of time it takes to transfer savings, investments and pensions electronically from one company to another by defining industry-wide standards and accrediting performance against them. STAR is the only cross-industry solution, bringing together platforms, ISA managers, pension companies, asset managers and transfer agents, galvanising the industry to put in place service-level agreements to ensure quick, efficient and predictable transfers and re-registration.