MessagePlus/Open and Box for SWIFTNet Web Services

Within the scope of Web development and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) Web Services have become an increasingly popular means of application integration. Basically Web Services provide a standard facility for interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. As a communication layer they use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to receive XML structured messages and to reply to these requests. Typically there is a machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

Intercope uses this technology to provide services to applications in both the generic business communication solution “MessagePlus/Open” and in the SWIFT Message Processing System “BOX for SWIFTNet”.

MessagePlus/Open provides a Web Service to create messages and to send them to various destinations. This “SubmitMessageRequest” contains one or more content items in different formats such as text or graphics and of course a recipient in form of a fax, email or SMS address.

The MessagePlus/Open Web Service replies with an “Order ID”. This Order ID can be used later by the client application to retrieve the actual status of the message. In response to this request the MessagePlus/Open Web Service replies with status information indicating if the message was sent successfully together with transmission time stamps and additional reference information.

BOXfor SWIFTNet currently provides two Web Services:

• The FIN MessageValidation Service allows an application to send a message to the service and to receive a reply indicating whether or not the message passed validation, or if not, which syntactical or semantic errors were detected.
• The RMA Fast Permission Check verifies if an RMA authorization exists for a specific correspondent and specific message type and returns the result to the calling application.

With these Web Services BOX for SWIFTNet provides the same functions as the former MERVA BKE lookup and the MERVA validation API call, but through a modern, future-oriented interface fitting into the strategy of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). One of the environments in which these services have been deployed and tested is the IBM Enterprise Payment Platform (EPP) where INTERCOPE achieved the then highest status of SOA certified partners with IBM.