Spanish banking group La Caixa d'Estalvis y Pensions de Barcelona (La Caixa) is using technology from Microsoft to develop a payments platform to support its new single euro payments area (Sepa) and Swift InterAct and FileAct messaging services.
La Caixa is implementing Microsoft's BizTalk Server and BizTalk Accelerator for Swift products to form the basis of its new payments infrastructure, which is expected to go live in Q4 this year.
The new platform will be used to manage Sepa credit and debit payments validation, enrichment, transformation and routing to the appropriate clearing house. The system will also form the foundation for FIN, FileAct and InterAct traffic messaging services.
Microsoft says its technology will provide the bank with a stable infrastructure to integrate mainframe and Windows services using different messaging systems.
Andreu Purroy, IT manager of clearing, settlement and Swift systems at La Caixa, says: "We wanted a new payments infrastructure for ISO20022 standards that could be easily integrated with our existing systems and agile enough to easily adapt any potential future modifications to Sepa formats and validations."
Purroy says the bank will also use the new infrastructure to process other bulk payments, in order to reduce complexity.