A punch line to a joke in the IT industry is this: The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them. OK, it’s not much of a joke. The point is that standards work best when there are only a few. In the IT industry, however, there already is an abundance of standards — and more keep arriving.

There even is an abundance of standards bodies. American National Standards Institute (ANSI), International Organization for Standards (ISO), the IEEE Standards Association, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are just the start. The Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) adds even more standards.

The CFO, however, is interested only in a few. Below, wiredFINANCE will hit on seven IT standards that impact the finance operation while skipping the ones so totally generic that you live with them every day and may not even realize it, like TCP/IP and HTTP, which underlie the Internet. Feel welcome to add any missed below in the comments section. more

Seeking to avoid a replay of the global credit freeze that crippled economies in 2008-2009, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision intends to phase in new capital leverage and liquidity standards for banks – an agreement referred to as Basel III – within the next 2 to 3 years.

This four-page Protiviti report summarizes current Basel II developments, provides an overview of the changes within the new agreement (which Group of 20 country leaders are expected to endorse next month in Korea), and analyzes the potential impact (not terribly dramatic, it appears) of the new regulations on the U.S. and global banking industries. ###

It seems that just about every country around the globe is looking to exports to help jump-start their economies. To do that, a few governments have taken steps to weaken their currencies, making their products relatively cheaper to foreign buyers.

Of course, China long has been a target of critics who charge that it keeps its currency, the yuan or renminbi, artificially low in order to protect its exporters. However, China’s currency actually has strengthened recently – just slightly, but still a move in the direction many outside the country want to see. In June, the yuan traded at 6.83 per U.S. dollar; today, it trades at 6.64 per greenback, according to x-rates.com. more