The original English version of the ISBP has now been out for more than four months. It has been read and studied by practitioners all over the world, and the ICC and the task force charged with writing the document have received a number of comments regarding the publication in general as well some related to specific paragraphs.

By far the majority of these comments are positive and optimistic as to the impact the contents of the publication will have on the number of imaginary discrepancies found in documents today, and some tell us that they have already used the ISBP with good result when informing rejecting banks of their non-acceptance of alleged discrepancies.

A number of ICC national committees and banking associations have found that it advantageous to translate the ISBP into the native language of their country, so there will soon be Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese and other versions in circulation.

Questions on paragraphs

Some of the people working with these translations have revealed and brought to the drafters' attention that there are some paragraphs in the ISBP which - despite the fact that they give exactly the same information and therefore ought to be worded exactly the same - are not precisely identical. This, we believe, should be remedied, as it could lead to the misunderstanding that there is an intended difference in meaning between such paragraphs.

Insurance documents

Another problem which has been brought to the task force's attention - and which was discussed during the ISBP conference on 20 May, and again at the Banking Commission meeting the following day - was the second half of paragraph 187, which says that banks will only accept an insurance document which shows that the risk is borne by more than one insurer if joint liability is declared or the leading insurer states that it bears 100% of the risk. These, the insurance company's claim, are requirements which cannot be met, as in an arrangement like this no insurer will be willing to declare joint liability and no insurer will bear 100% of the risk.

The Banking Commission agreed that a new task force charged with solving this problem in the quickest possible way should be set up. The task force studied the various inputs on the subject and came to the conclusion that it could not be established for certain that it is indeed international standard banking practice to make requirements like those described in the second half of paragraph 187. Consequently, it was decided that the second half of paragraph 187 should be deleted (see link below).

The original task force on the ISBP would have much preferred to have had the recent comments on paragraph 187 at an earlier stage, as it is obviously a problem to make changes to a document already printed and distributed. The third and fourth revisions of the text were widely available some months ago, and no such comments were received at that time.

Corrigenda

Nonetheless, the ICC has decided to make a corrigenda deleting the second half of paragraph 187 and also explaining that the few differences in wording between similar paragraphs, as mentioned above, are just that: differences in wording, not in meaning. The corrigenda, the text of which follows this article, will be included with new purchases of ISBP and will be sent in an appropriate number to the national committees and others who have already received copies of the first print of the publication. Furthermore, the information will be posted on the ICC home page.

The ISBP - corrigenda is posted on DC-PRO at :

ISBP - Corrigenda.pdf

Ole Malmqvist is Co-chair of the task force that developed the ISBP.