In this interview Allan Grody describes his experiences during a long term (and ongoing) campaign to seek adoption of a system to enable the assessment of aggregated systemic risk in the trading and settlement of global financial transactions. The proposal called, colloquially, "The Barcodes of Finance" is based on the system used to track manufactured products (GS1), with identifiers of organisations, products and contracts integrated into a single system. The interview covers the problems of effecting change in global market practice when regulators are national organisations and the largest participating corporations are global. The interview discusses who can influence and make policy and the difficulties of ensuring implementation of change in depth. Mr Grody argues that present policy is repeating the mistakes of the past and is developing systems that will not prove fit for purpose. The interview illustrates the difficulties of securing adoption of global standards in an interconnected world where power is widely distributed, technical knowledge among decision makers is limited and vested commercial interests abound
