BOX Messaging Hub

Intercope’s BOX product provides a single window for the financial messaging and gateway requirements of our customers. As well as network and market infrastructure connectivity, BOX has comprehensive functionality for back-office integration, manual message processing, warehouse, and archiving.

Fully integrated with the customer’s choice of infrastructure, the solution is based on a robust and format independent engine. BOX includes a flexible workflow engine for file/message management and orchestration – including routing, exception handling and interoperability with one or more networks and market infrastructures.

BOX supports multiple financial networks (EBICS, SIAnet and SWIFTNet) on the same platform, with further network interfaces implemented based on customer community demand.

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BOX is a native ISO 20022 solution and presents the same look-and-feel for either SWIFT FIN, ISO 20022 XML, EBICS and SIA messages. BOX has the complete ISO 7775 / 15022 and 20022 stacks with embedded transformations for SEPA, TARGET2, CBPR+, CHAPS, MEPS, CHATS and all migrating schemes stored and managed in the Message Warehouse. BOX provides monitoring, reporting and real-time dashboards of all activities for full view and control.

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Conversion of industry files/messages to/from proprietary and legacy formats in BOX allows customers to shield their back-office applications from SWIFT and market infrastructure scheme changes. This is managed through new GUI driven configuration. Complete message and file validation (syntax, semantics, cross-field) is provided as well as bi-directional conversion for SWIFT MT / MX messages per schemes managed and maintained by Intercope.

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BOX provides manual and automated message processing, error handling, with comprehensive workflow and routing. The new BOX payments message warehouse with archiving provides a full view of all data activities in/out of the bank, co-existence of all new (ISO 20022) and old scheme messages, side by side, with any truncated data. This provides full overview for all reconciliation activities for individual scheme and cross border payments, and very importantly a single source for regulation reporting.

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A unique to the market multi-network solution. BOX supports multiple financial networks (EBICS, SIAnet and SWIFTNet) on the same platform. Protocol specific functions are implemented in dedicated interfaces and decoupled from the rest of the application, allowing connections to further networks without changing the Messaging server core. BOX supports the concurrent use of these multiple financial networks on the one instance. BOX customers can uniquely decide which market infrastructure to best use for business decisions and not just based on technology and network limitations. This protects and regulates BOX customers for Systemically Important Payments Systems (SIPS) oversight requirements by removing all single points of failure – future proofing against increased regulation. 

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What’s in BOX – let’s unpack it!

Supporting ISO 20022

BOX provides full support for ISO 20022, including MT/MX coexistence and support for the cross-border and high-value payments migrations – beginning November 2022. BOX provides complete message and file validation (syntax, semantics, cross-field), including bi-directional conversion for SWIFT FIN and ISO 20022 messages for CBPR+, T2/T2S consolidation, EURO1/STEP1, CHAPS, CHATS, MEPS+, FED and TCH.

Conversion of industry to/from proprietary and legacy formats in BOX allows customers to shield their back-office applications from periodic SWIFT and market infrastructure changes.

Cloud native deployment

As well as traditional on-premise and service bureau deployments, BOX now offers a cloud deployment option. 

BOX deployments in cloud infrastructure container environments are something Intercope has been working on with IBM Secure Service container and Red Hat Openshift container for a number of years. The next stage was to test BOX on public cloud infrastructures and this went live in 2020 on IBM FS public cloud, Amazon AWS, Google cloud and Microsoft Azure for public, private or hybrid cloud deployments of BOX – providing a potential future deployment model option or even the ability to stand up new test environments quickly off premise.

This has gone very well in a ‘lift and shift’ style solution migration, allowing customers to take advantage of BOX functionality as they have it today, straight away in the cloud.

The next evolution is a cloud-optimised BOX solution where specific services in BOX are available uniquely as micro style services with accessibility via API in a cloud optimised solution. This is the same great BOX functionality running cloud natively in a private, public or hybrid cloud with data access points via API to the bank, and connectivity to the interbank networks through bank or cloud hosted virtualised devices via BOX.

Format Conversions and Enrichments

BOX comes with conversion between SWIFT FIN (MT) and ISO 20022 (MX) messages, and vice versa. The product supports SEPA, CBPR+, TARGET2 Services, EURO1/STEP1, SIC, CHAPS, CHATS, MEPS messages for ISO 20022 and their migration paths. Intercope have developed a new conversion methodology in BOX to allow for better management for our customers of these data/message translation requirements.

This facilitates easier back-office integration and scheme changes, allowing updates for new scheme releases via GUI configuration instead of code – using a new MT-MX conversion module driven by Transformation Scripts.

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The spreadsheet providing all fields of the source and target, with detailed field mappings between the source (MT or MX) and the target (MT or MX). This allows our customers to not just review the specific scheme transformation rules, but also how they are implemented in BOX and how they can then be configured for the customer specific integration point – the key to any transformation project

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The Message Transformation Scripts

  • Driving the transformation
  • Automated from business analyst spreadsheets
  • Part of BOX product deliverables
  • Can be configured and adapted by customers
  • Can be enhanced with customer specific enrichment information
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Message transformation library

  • Covering all functions defined in the BOX
    MT <–> MX mapping spreadsheet
  • Part of INTERCOPE deliverables
  • Manage the ”failed transformation list” 

Multi-network switch

BOX supports multiple financial networks, such as EBICS, SIAnet and SWIFTNet providing customers with a multi-network switch and single view for messages and files.

  • SEPA SCT and STEP2 via SWIFTNet, SIAnet or EBICS
  • Instant Payments for RT1 via EBICS, SIAnet or SWIFTNet
  • Instant Payments for TIPS via SIAnet or SWIFTNet
  • T2 via SIA-Colt or SWIFTNet
  • TARGET services (TARGET2, T2S and ECMS via ESMIG) via SIA-Colt or SWIFTNet
  • EURO1/STEP1 via SWIFTNet

BOX can take a transaction from the customers payment application and transfer it without any destination or network specific envelope information.

Multi-CSM capability

With its multi-network capability, BOX can connect to several clearing and settlement mechanisms (CSM). This multi-network and multi-CSM capability in BOX allows customers to make business choices on which market infrastructure to connect to, without being restricted by their gateway technology.

BOX allows large institutions to handle multiple banks (direct and indirect), and BICS on one system, with separated entities (i.e. with workflow, routing and data completely separated) running across multiple geographies, controlled by the customer.

Instant Payments

BOX supports Instant Payments with messaging intelligence for continuous operations with a deployment on our customer’s choice of infrastructure. With additional multi-network functionality, BOX supports both EBA CLEARING RT1 and ECB TIPS for all network options.

Low latency with high scalability ensures high throughput and peak volume handling. BOX provides a unique dashboard for Instant Payments to support Operations.

BOX functionality

BOX supports all SWIFT business areas and interfaces (FIN, FileAct, InterAct, FINPlus, RMA).
BOX is a trusted and secure solution. Intercope are an industry forerunner in the SWIFT CSP certification program. As the solution is de-coupled from the back-office payments applications/hubs, it shields these systems from on-going SWIFT maintenance and reduces the impact of network and scheme interruptions. It also allows customers to position the solution for all their inter-bank gateway requirements and SWIFT business areas inside a secure DMZ style network location – ensuring SWIFT CSP compliance on a single platform.

The solution is based on a robust, generic, and format independent messaging engine.

BOX includes a flexible workflow engine for file/message management and orchestration, routing, exception handling, transformation and monitoring.

The BOX routing component can analyse all fields of a message including header information, user or applications defined fields and information generated by BOX. Based on this analysis, multiple routing destinations can be assigned.

Routing rules can be defined in a table based graphical user interface, or alternatively in a traditional analysis programming language.

BOX comes with a workflow visualization tool that provides a graphical view of the workflow. The tool identifies errors or discrepancies in the workflow.

The visualization can be of parts of the existing workflow or the full workflow. The selection of the parts to be visualized is done via the BOX Web-Client.

RMA is a security component used within SWIFT communications to allow granular control of messages sent to and received from any correspondent. RMA was first introduced for FIN messages replacing the former BKE mechanisms. Later on, RMA also became available for the InterAct and FileAct services offered by SWIFT. In 2020 RMA for FINplus services had been added.

BOX offers a fully SWIFT certified RMA solution for all available SWIFT services.

Zero downtime is an essential part of the BOX deployment capability. BOX comes fully active/active, 365/24/7. Downtime windows with weekends spent deploying solution patches and industry updates are issues of the past. Our customers require solutions which are constantly on, always available, fault-tolerant and with disaster-recovery embedded as default.

BOX analytic functions are used to determine which messages require processing by external applications. Reply messages are received from the external application and appended to the original message. The data provided by the external application can be viewed in the standard journals and queues using XHTML technology.

Supporting multiple financial networks with a robust and agile workflow engine, to integrate back-office applications at a reduced cost and time to market for our customers.

Additionally, BOX allows customers to migrate seamlessly to BOX, by using emulation, i.e., allowing back-end applications to remain unchanged.

BOX Payments Message Warehouse

Intercope have developed a new Payments Message Warehouse for BOX in response to customer requests for their ISO 20022 payments migrations, driving a need to control, manage and reconcile translations and have a central overview repository for reconciliation and reporting.

It comes with a single repository overview of all payments data passing in/out of BOX providing extensive search and reporting capabilities for both MT and MX and importantly reconciliation functionality for both together through the Payments Journal View.

BOX Payments Message Warehouse reporting

This full overview and combined MT/MX Payments Journal view allows for standardised reporting in BOX around these payment activities. BOX now comes with ‘out of the BOX’ reports using this Payments Message Warehouse, for RTGS balances, RTGS or CBPR+ scheme summary information and reports per Creditor/Debtor, numbers for payments messages with/without positive/negative acknowledgements and other standard reports which customers can edit/create themselves from this central place to report on all MT/MX activity on transactions entering/leaving the bank through the inter-bank networks.

BOX Solution Overview

For more in-depth information about BOX, please request the BOX Solution Overview. 

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BOX Certifications & Release Cycle