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Microsoft Corp. announces a solution designed to lower the cost of messaging for corporate treasuries and financial services firms. According to the company, the Financial Messaging Service Bus is a componentized financial services industry integration solution built upon the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009.

The company says that by providing pre-built service components, the Financial Messaging Service Bus simplifies mission-critical financial messaging for banks, payments processors and other financial institutions, and provides a solution platform for Microsoft technology partners.

Microsoft says 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 solutions to be built and to co-exist with legacy applications as part of a technology renewal program.

The Financial Messaging Service Bus 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. It saves financial services industry clients and technology solutions partners substantial time and money in building and implementing payments and capital markets solutions.

“Financial messaging and integration are becoming commoditized — and should be,” said Andy Schmidt, research director for Global Payments at TowerGroup. “Banks need a simpler, more cost-effective way to re-engineer payments processes but should be ensuring that they don’t reinforce silos. There is a real need to use out-of-the-box components that reduce the complexity of integration, and that both build on and with existing technology, to avoid building costly technology islands.”

The Financial Messaging Service Bus utilizes 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, Financial Messaging Service Bus components can be integrated easily with Microsoft Office products, including Excel and SharePoint, for a complete operations management and business intelligence solution.

Financial messaging is a commodity service within payments and capital markets processing, and the Financial Messaging Service Bus is designed to provide a simpler, configurable approach to messaging that delivers significant implementation and operational efficiencies for financial institutions.

Microsoft says that the Financial Messaging Service Bus 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.
 

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