The New York-based group now counts 20 financial services firms as members. Membership now includes ABN Amro, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Fidelity Investments, Gerstner Lehrman, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Paragon Markets, Prudential Securities, Soros Fund Management, and UBS

Additionally, ABN AMRO and Citigroup join CFSB, Deutsche Bank, Chase, Lehman, Merrill, Morgan Stanley and UBS -- the association's founding members -- on the steering board.

The group also said Deutsche Bank's Graham Lawlor will assume the post of co-chair, joining current co-chair Ursula Mills, of UBS. Additionally, Andy Konchan of ABN AMRO has been appointed as chairman of the FIMA User Group.

FIMA also unveiled its public Web site, www.financialim.org.

"We've been so focused on meeting and working through some of this stuff that one of the things lacking was a public Web site," Mills, a co-chair of the group, told InstantMessagingPlanet earlier this year.

FIMA grew out of the Instant Messaging Standards Board, which formed in April 2002 in response to increasing demand for IM access by clients and employees, and concerns by IT about investing in closed systems, IMSB launched with the goal of achieving IM interoperability across the financial services industry.

In October of that year, IMSB rebranded itself as FIMA.

According to its mandate, the group is non-partisan and does not sponsor any particular product. It does share member experiences and best practices, and collectively invites vendors to showcase their solutions.

It also supports IM standards and protocols recognized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). By endorsing IETF instant messaging standards, FIMA has said it seeks to promote interoperability and beneficial competition among IM vendors within the financial industry.

But, of course, there are no IETF instant messaging standards. Major IM vendors like IBM and Microsoft have thrown their support behind an IM version of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE), while Hewlett-Packard and France Telecom support the Jabber protocol, formally known as Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Both SIMPLE and XMPP are represented in IETF working groups.

"It's an ongoing work in progress," Mills said of FIMA's efforts. "We're continuing to help best define the user requirements, as well as set some direction for the vendors and give them feedback, and continuing to monitor what's happening at the IETF."

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.com.