Microsoft has launched Financial Messaging Service Bus, a componentised financial services industry integration system built upon its BizTalk Server 2009. The company said that by providing pre-built service components, the Financial Messaging Service Bus simplifies financial messaging for banks, payments processors and other financial institutions, and provides a platform for its technology partners.
The Financial Messaging Service Bus not only applies to SWIFT or payments, but is extensible across all financial messaging systems as an integration framework allowing new products to be built and to co-exist with legacy applications as part of a technology renewal program.
According to Microsoft, the new offering cuts the cost of development, and speeds up the implementation process by providing reusable service-oriented architecture (SOA) components to simplify financial messaging integration, rather than requiring extensive onsite process engineering.
The Financial Messaging Service Bus utilises the Microsoft BizTalk Server Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Toolkit for data transformation and transaction workflow management, and extends the standard ESB to add audit trail and business activity monitoring specific to financial services. Furthermore, its components can be integrated with Microsoft Office products, including Excel and SharePoint, for a operations management and business intelligence product.
Susan Hauser, vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, said: “Secure and reliable transaction delivery is essential to financial services firms, but technology solutions must also be cost-effective to implement and manage. Our long-standing partnership with SWIFT, and our commitment to support technology partners, uniquely positions us to provide these reliable and cost-effective solutions to all financial institutions.”
In the past year Microsoft has added BizTalk Server support for Alliance Lite, thereby enabling SWIFTNet connectivity across the internet.
The company claims that with the new offering, it addresses the need for a systemic approach to messaging integration across the financial services industry. As a result, banks now can further leverage an investment in BizTalk Server as an infrastructure for payments and SWIFT messaging and extend that to support new financial applications in any geographic location.
