The new initiatives were unveiled at the Swift international banking and operations seminar in Geneva and are pitched to appeal to current bank pre-occupations with cost reduction and process efficiency.

With the mandatory migration to the new SwiftNet IP network underway, IBM has released WebSphere Business Integration for Financial Networks, an integration hub tuned to deliver connectivity to multiple external financial networks, including Swift.

Introducing the product, Paraic Sweeney, IBM vice president marketing, WebSphere says that the banking co-operative talks about SwiftNet as providing a single window to Swift services. “But institutions also see the benefit of a single window into a variety of networks.”

He says the framework will minimise investment to support additional financial network connections and services, including InterAct, FIN and Trust ePayments.

In parallel, IBM also confirmed plans to introduce WebSphere Business Integration for Financial Markets, a complementary product designed to automate the post-trade pre-settlement process for cross-border trades. Available in the fourth quarter, the platform will enable process integration for global straight through processing and Financial Information Exchange, says Sweeney.

IBM additionally previewed a $1 million investment in a development centre devoted to helping financial services firms convert to Linux. The new facility will be based at the vendor’s Southbank location close to the City of London and will host hardware and software from IBM and partner firms backed by 70 dedicated Linux staff and specialists in Sun Solaris-to-Linux migration. Participating companies include, Red Hat, Intel, Morse, Computacenter, SunGard Front Capital Systems, ADP Wilco, Veritas, and Oracle.

The investment in the London centre matches that made by IBM in May to open an equivalent facility in New York. Mark Greene, IBM general manager, banking, says: “The early results from our work in New York suggest that Linux is quite viable for a number of financial services.”

In other news, IBM announced the deployment by Credit Lyonnais of IBM CrossWorlds technology to manage its equity capital markets operations. Crossworlds, acquired by IBM earlier in the year, is the foundation platform for the WebSphere Financial Markets package.

Working with IBM and local consulting firm Unilog Management, the French bank has used the technology to integrate internal applications and databases, extend applications externally, and automate the processing of deals. The first phase of the project has been completed – based around the redefinition of business process flows between the front and back office – and the technology is ready to be rolled out across the bank’s locations in Europe, North America and Asia.

Seperately, IBM also announced a joint initiative with Scandinavian bank Nordea covering payment initiation for corporates over the Internet using Identrus-based authentication. IBM’s involvement is part of a global programme by Nordea to speed up the implementation of Internet-based secure messaging services, and matches a similar announcement made this morning by the Nordic bank and Microsoft. The bank says it is also working to bring Intel and Nokia into the project.