Automated payment and settlement for the financial industry are the focus of the BizTalk Server 2004 Accelerator for SWIFT, an add-on to Microsoft's application integration and business process modeling product. Released in Aug. 2004, the Accelerator will help banks, securities firms, and enterprises integrate Windows applications with popular electronic payment networks. It could also enable Microsoft and partners to increase the foothold of BizTalk and related products in the financial industry. However, current BizTalk users will have to upgrade to BizTalk 2004 and install various patches to get the Accelerator, and it's not compatible with Microsoft's previous financial messaging solution.

Accelerator Supports Banking, Securities

The Accelerator for SWIFT is designed to support use of BizTalk Server 2004 for financial messaging. BizTalk Server is Microsoft's product for integrating applications. It routes and translates messages among applications and enforces and automates business process workflow to support either internal business processes or business-to-business transactions.

The Accelerator supports the network and financial message standards created by SWIFT (The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), a cooperative created by global banks to run an electronic network for interbank transfers. Bank-to-bank traffic still dominates the SWIFT network today, but securities firms are increasingly using it for post-trade settlement and payment, a component of straight-through processing (STP) of trades, in which financial transactions are automated so they are completed in near real-time, rather than over today’s more typical three-day cycle. A few large corporations also use the network to automate regular transactions with their banks. Apart from operating the network, SWIFT is an important contributor to financial messaging standards in the International Standards Organization (ISO) and elsewhere, and its standards are occasionally used in private payment networks.

The Accelerator for SWIFT delivers BizTalk Server 2004 components that process messages in FIN, a text format that is the main SWIFT message standard and also the basis of the ISO 15022 financial messaging standard.

Major components of the Accelerator include the following:

• Translation between BizTalk Server's internal message format and FIN
• XML schemas for 131 types of FIN messages, enabling BizTalk Server to automatically validate messages' structure (such as field lengths and data types) as they pass through the system
• Business rules that can validate messages against more dynamic data (e.g., checking bank routing codes) than can be done with schemas
• Sample orchestrations and other sample code and documentation that demonstrate how to extend the Accelerator to support specific payment and settlement processes.

The Accelerator for SWIFT supersedes the BizTalk Server Accelerator for Financial Services, an earlier accelerator that covered roughly a third of the message types implemented in the Accelerator for SWIFT. The Accelerator for SWIFT also includes the RosettaNet Payments toolkit, which supports payment with RosettaNet, a messaging standard typically used for supply chain integration in the electronics and computer industries.

Windows Integration, Late Adopters Targets

Global banks and larger securities firms frequently already have a solution for basic SWIFT message processing. However, the Accelerator for SWIFT could prove useful for organizations that want to integrate SWIFT traffic with Windows-based applications, such as SharePoint portals, Exchange e-mail, or vertical applications. The Accelerator could also get a foothold in smaller financial firms that have yet to adopt SWIFT, and in larger nonfinancial corporations that want to use SWIFT to automate cash management or create a "single window" to all the banks they do business with.

Most projects that use the Accelerator for SWIFT will also require a systems integrator that has specific expertise with both SWIFT and BizTalk Server. Unisys offers systems integration services, as do a variety of regional systems integrators (e.g. Eastern Networks in the eastern Mediterranean). Additional software will be needed to support STP or single-window banking with the Accelerator; Capco, for instance, offers software for these functions.

Organizations that have already used BizTalk Server 2000 or 2002 for financial messaging will also likely need help migrating their solutions to the Accelerator, because BizTalk Server 2004 is not compatible with earlier versions, and there are no automated tools for moving solution components (including components of the Accelerator for Financial Services) from earlier versions to the new version.

Further Enhancements, XML on Horizon

Microsoft intends to continue to enhance the Accelerator for SWIFT through a series of Web releases. Planned improvements in the next (version 2.1) release include support for all 358 FIN message types and templates for Microsoft's InfoPath forms application that enable users to enter data for FIN messages and validate their inputs.

The SWIFT organization itself continues to evolve. With several other standards organizations, SWIFT is working on a new financial messaging standard called UNIFI (ISO 20022) that uses some of the same concepts as FIN but covers more transaction types and uses XML message syntax, rather than the more compact text syntax of FIN. With the Accelerator for SWIFT and BizTalk Server's tools for XML processing, Microsoft is potentially in a good position to support the UNIFI standard that emerges.

Requirements, Pricing, and Resources

The BizTalk Server 2004 Accelerator for SWIFT requires BizTalk Server 2004 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition; it has not been tested with Partner Edition and is not recommended for it, which will limit the Accelerator's use in very small organizations such as bank branches. The Accelerator costs US$4,999 per processor for Standard Edition and US$19,999 for Enterprise Edition.

The Accelerator also requires the BizTalk Server 2004 Rollup Package 1 (a collection of 14 post-release bug fixes for BizTalk Server 2004) and an additional hotfix (explained in KB article 838221). Administrators should also consult the Accelerator's release notes for other warnings and limitations before installing.

The Accelerator for SWIFT Web site is www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/swift.

SWIFT is at www.swift.org.