Microsoft Corp. and Sterling Commerce Inc. are offering banks and financial services companies new connectivity and messaging options when using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications SWIFTnet network.
Microsoft, at the Sibos conference in Singapore last week, announced its BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT, which provides integration with legacy systems through a fairly comprehensive set of connectivity interfaces. Accelerator supports both FIN, SWIFTs X.25-based store-and-forward financial messaging service, and XML-based SWIFT messaging.
The thousands of financial institutions that use SWIFTnet can use BizTalks business activity monitoring capability to track SWIFT traffic. This capability enables financial institutions to create custom dashboards through embedded SWIFT rules, mappings and validations. Accelerator also includes tools for manual message entry and message repair, according to Microsoft officials, in Redmond, Wash.
Accelerator includes the RosettaNet payments tool kit, software that provides financial institutions and their partners with the means to automate payment processes for their supply chain transactions.
Also at the Sibos conference, Sterling and LogicaCMG plc. rolled out FileAct, a joint service that will enable members of the SWIFTnet community to send messages over the network. Sterling, of Dublin, Ohio, has long provided electronic data interchange transaction services to the financial community, while London-based LogicaCMG develops payment systems software.
With FileAct, financial institutions can selectively route messages to remote parties at single or multiple destinations through either the FIN or FileAct services. However, FileAct is much cheaper, Sterling officials said.
Because data latency for message delivery can be controlled by the user, FileAct is suited to deliver messages such as low-value payments, reconciliation data and reporting.