IBM has announced a suite of middleware products aimed at helping
the world's largest banks speed up their transition to SwiftNet as
well as to make trusted electronic payments more secure.
The Websphere Financial Network Integrator is designed to serve as
a platform offering an "integration" base to support communications
channels as well as common infrastructure services including
message warehousing, security, and communication channel
administration.
The suite is also intended to link banks' existing financial
network integration technologies to business integration
technologies, including some of IBM's middleware products such as
WebSphere, MQSeries Integrator, DB2, and CrossWorlds.
"One of the problems we are trying to solve with this is to give
financial institutions a means to migrate from an X.25-based
implementation to an IP-based implementation and to use our
field-proven middleware products as underpinnings for that," said
Melanie Rose, director, of solutions technologies development for
IBM software group.
The other issue IBM is trying to address with this offering,
according to Rose, is to help financial institutions take better
advantage of the Identrus standard that enables buyers, sellers,
and their respective banks to conduct e-business transactions in a
secure way.
"The intent here is to pull together the four [middleware products]
to exploit every bit of capability they have, and then on top of
that to provide a thin layer of services needed for any financial
services hub to do high-quality transaction processing," Rose
said.
That thin layer of services would consist of functions such as
duplicate message detection, support for PKI, various auditing
capabilities, and an administration console, Rose added.
The integrated solution also works with IBM's Merva software, which
is IBM's mechanism for handling Swift messaging, making the
transition to the SwiftNet technology smoother, company officials
said. It also supports IBM's Trusted e-Payments Initiation
solution, which is based around Identrus.
"[IBM is] essentially migrating to support Swift's movement from
X.25 to Internet-based technologies. If IBM does not replace the
current Merva interface to X.25, financial institutions would have
to build it themselves or get it from a vendor who has interfaces
that deal directly with the network," said Robert Landry,
vice-president of research for The Tower Group.
"If institutions got their own they might move away from IBM to
platforms offered by other vendors," Landry said.
Established by Swift, the world's largest financial messaging
services provider, SwiftNet is a network that facilitates the
after-hours clearing of payments among all banks.
"Every night banks shut down to process and settle payments made
among each other. So if a bank misses, say, its two-hour window to
do that, the losses in terms of value, time, and money can be
measured in the millions. It is mission-critical work that goes on
every night," Rose said.
All major banks must migrate over to the IP-based version of
SwiftNet by the first half of 2005, which does not give major banks
a lot of time to accomplish the transition, according to Rose. The
benefit, however, is that it reduces total cost of ownership to
banks as well as allows them to roll out other clearing services
based on the latest XML standards as adopted by Swift.
"Our 7,000 global customers will need a smooth transition to the
new SwiftNet service," said Luc VanBergen, the Swift project
manager for SwiftNet migration. "Processing Swift messages will be
essential to financial institutions, so at no time can they allow
any outage, not even during the migration phase," he said.