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Best Practices for SWIFTNet FIN Coexistence and Convergence Initiatives

Wayne Meikle, Director of Financial Services, IONA Technologies, and Malene McMahon, Business Manager in the Standards Department of SWIFT discuss how financial services companies can deal with the co-existence of SWIFTNet FIN standards with new standards and how they can both be supported

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"I am pleased with the 19% overall revenue and 25% license revenue growth coupled with the continued growth of our Artix™ business. Artix license revenue growth was 82%, driven by our Global 2000 customer base in our key verticals, including for example, Citigroup, DZ Bank, Poste Italiane and Nokia," said Peter Zotto, CEO, IONA Technologies. "CORBA continues to be a significant contributor to our cash and profits with revenue at a better than expected rate of decline of 8%." Mr. Zotto continued, "We added enterprise level capabilities to our FUSE family of open source SOA products, building upon the already strong brand and technology gained from the LogicBlaze acquisition. FUSE, together with our expanded Artix product line, which now includes industry leading data services and registry/repository capabilities, is providing an expanded customer reach and creating new opportunities for IONA."

View the press release at:
http://www.iona.com/pressroom/2007/20071018.htm

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Below is a Q & A with Wayne Meikle, the financial services sales and marketing director for IONA. Wayne shares some information on one of our latest solution sets tailored specifically for Financial Services, the IONA SWIFTNet FIN Services.

Q: What is the problem that you see in the financial services industry that the SWIFT Net FIN Solution addresses?
The SWIFT FIN messaging services are used by over 8000 financial firms in 208 countries. It is the global backbone for inter-firm communication for all international and a considerable amount of domestic business in the areas of payments, securities settlement, foreign exchange and money markets, trade finance amongst other areas.

And it's big - average daily number of messages YTD in 2007 is 13.6 million and is increasing by over 21% year on year.

The problems that the firms need to deal with are integrating application processing logic with what is a set of complex data model external messaging standards. The drive is to support inter-firm Straight-Through-Processing (STP) messaging with no human intervention and minimal exception rates.

The SWIFT FIN data format is legacy and ugly. It is a complex tag/value format: numerous format specific qualifiers, data models that are overloaded for use within multiple business contexts, and complex business semantic rules such as verifying that a settlement date is chronologically later than a trade date, as having them the other way around does not make business sense. And the standards for the models change annually with mandatory technical compliance required. This requires firms to have high levels of internal expertise for both integration build and maintenance for these standards.

Which costs time and money. The IONA SWIFTNet FIN solution proposition is an efficiency gain in both time and money terms.

We solve this problem by enabling the firms to use an external specialist supplier and maintainer of these standards, using our open and platform neutral technology to integrate with them, and providing a service level that ensures the standards are fully supported and kept in sync with the published standards.

Q: What is the SWIFTNet FIN Solution?
The IONA Artix SWIFTNet FIN Solution is a bundle of our Artix product suite with the pre-built, and SWIFT accreditated, SWIFT FIN messaging services Artix Data Services Standards Library. This is composed of 3 things:

1. A full syntactical implementation of the SWIFT FIN data model standards
2. A full implementation of the FIN "Network Validated Rules" - i.e the semantic rules contraints
3. And a library of in excess of 24,000 valid and invalid test instance documents that are designed to stress every message type and every semantic rule.

Overal this package provides a very high confidence level implementation baseline for customers so they don't have to concern themselves with technical compliance with the standards. All with a service level guarantee that it is fit for purpose and will be maintained as such.

Q: Can you give us examples of customers?
We have a range of firms using our SWIFTNet FIN solution in different sectors of the financial services markets. These include:

• Central Banks - covering various transaction flows including RTGS systems, securities and payments
• Investment Banks - various operational units in a number of the top global investment banks use IONA technology, including the SWIFTNet FIN solutions in securities settlement, statements and reconciliation, payments, corporate actions, and foreign exchange and money markets.
• Investment Management firms - buy-side firms use our SWIFTNet FIN solutions in support of portfolio and order management systems for trade settlement instructions, confirmations, reconciliation as well as specific initiatives such as stock lending.
• Utilities- industry utilities cover a range of business areas and often need to support multiple standards, specifically the older FIN standards, as well as the newer standards such as ISO20022 XML, the SWIFT MX based standards, and those for the Single European Payment Area (SEPA) initiative. IONA SWIFTNet FIN solution users include all of these.

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To read more about SWIFTNet FIN, please enjoy the following article written by Wayne "Dealing with Diversity for Financial Services Messaging" featured in the October issue of TICKER a Wall Street Technology Association publication."

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