SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) was founded back in 1973 with the objective of developing a modern communications system as an alternative to telex which had been used for financial transactions up to this time. As of today this objective has been achieved to a high degree and in consequence SWIFT is removing telex, testkey and fax functionality in the latest version 7.0 of SWIFT Alliance Access and Entry (SAA) which will be available at the end of 2010.
However, not all financial institutions are in the position to completely abandon telex and fax communication, and testkey security for financial message transfer. In particular in Africa and some Asian countries trading partners not reachable by SWIFT still rely on telex communication and testkey is also used to secure messages sent in other formats such as faxes. So what is the best thing to do if you still need telex, fax or testkey, but your SWIFT Alliance solution no longer supports these features?
Intercope has been providing telex, fax and testkey solutions for the financial industry for more than 25 years, and also developed the shortly to be discontinued telex, fax and testkey functions of SWIFT Alliance. The current versions of INTERCOPE’s “TelexPlus/Open” and “TestPlus/Open” are modern solutions supporting all telex and testkey requirement for the financial industry and in addition „MessagePlus/Open“ also provides these features and comprehensive fax functionality. “INTERCOPE is fully committed to preserving the telex, fax and testkey investments of each SAA user and to providing the most cost effective way to ensure business continuity in those areas where traffic, whilst lighter in volume, retains a strategic importance” states Reinhart Laumer, President and CEO of INTERCOPE GmbH.
IBM’s MERVA (Message Entry and Routing with Interfaces to Various Applications), originally developed in the 1980s, evolved into a de facto standard for SWIFT FIN for large financial institutions. Now companies face the challenge of replacing their extensive MERVA system with a more up to date application exploiting today’s state of the art technology and architectures but at the same time retaining the rich application functionality provided by MERVA including:
Manual data entry, authorization and correction
Sophisticated printing services
Complex organizational structures modelled via MERVA queues
Elaborate analysis / routing mechanisms to determine the routing of messages
Customer specific special processing for transactions interacting in a multitude of ways with MERVA using batch processing, API calls, and options such as the event driven launching of external applications or message validation services
Intercope’s MERVA experts are currently successfully working on such projects with 5 large financial institutions in both Europe and the US. Together with the customers they have analysed the MERVA queue structure, routing rules, application interfaces and other functions used in production systems. In a second step these rules and functions are modelled using BOX for SWIFTNet entities. This has resulted, in all 5 projects, in significant optimization and streamlining of daily processing. Finally, BOX for SWIFTNet is configured to meet the customer’s specific requirements on a development system and goes through the staging process of IT testing and user acceptance testing to the production system. With service providers and multi bank institutions this exercise is repeated many times as they operate BOX for SWIFTNet for many customers who all use MERVA in different flavours and configurations. This way one customer after another can be migrated in a flexible schedule avoiding any interference and big bang risk.
The configuration of multi-instance installations is eased by the combination of tools allowing the definition of generic parameters, workflows and routing rules for all entities but with specific settings for each organization and organizational unit. Also for the staging through development, acceptance and production systems easy to use tools are used whereby the configuration of one system can be exported, system specific parameters such as IP addresses are adopted by definitions in script files and the data is imported to the next system. Due to the flexibility of the software and the efficient cooperation of Intercope and customer experts this process has already been managed successfully – with one of the customers migrating 17 banks located in 9 countries over the past two years.
Typically these BOX for SWIFTNet installations include all the application functionality previously provided by MERVA and are using the Relationship Management Application as part of the security layer. With the BOX CBT version available in 4Q 2010 the network layer is also provided as an integral part of the product allowing these and other MERVA users to address their total SWIFT business needs with a single unique application avoiding the risk and cost of deploying a fragmented set of technologies.
Box for Swiftnet has been designed from the outset to support all types of SWIFT messages, both FIN and XML. Intercope has implemented ISO 20022 messages so far for RMA, SEPA, Cash Management and Target 2. Thanks to the underlying XML-based technology of BOX for SWIFTNet Intercope is in the position to support further message groups (business areas) very easily and efficiently, and in a short time frame.In addition the flexible and configurable message processing engine of BOX for SWIFTNet provides an ideal platform to implement specific functionality for specific message groups extending the scope of purely message related functions.
To learn more about these functions download the following document: BOX-XML-messages.pdf.
