Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management, a subsidiary of Allianz Dresdner Asset Management of America, is the first public customer to use the new BizTalk Accelerator for Swift for processing and integration of all Swift securities messages.

"We expect to save 50 per cent in infrastructure costs once we complete our implementation of BizTalk Accelerator for Swift," says Daniel Stroot, chief technology officer at Nicholas-Applegate.

Microsoft has also announced it is participating in the RosettaNet Payment Milestone Programme, an initiative designed to drive the automation of payments from RosettaNet business processes.

RosettaNet is a non-profit consortium of more than 400 of the world's leading IT, electronic components, semiconductor and solution provider companies working to create, implement and promote open e-business process standards.

To back up its participation in the programme it has launched RosettaNet Payments Toolkit, a package designed to support the initiative and provide financial institutions and their corporate customers with an efficient way of automating the payments process for supply chain transactions.

The toolkit aims to provide a cost-effective way for firms to integrate the payment process quickly and easily into existing IT systems. Currently, the payments process still often relies heavily on manual reconciliation to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, representing significant costs to banks and businesses.

"Industry estimates indicate that for every billion dollars in sales, the cost to corporations alone for settling these transactions is around $27 million," says Josh Weisberg, senior product manager for e-business server marketing at Microsoft. "The transition to automated processes that use standard messaging infrastructure and technologies for handling corporate payments will result in huge cost savings for both corporations and banks."

Microsoft says the package can help corporations automate the payment initiation and reconciliation of credit advices with remittance advices, using the Swift payment initiation and cash-reporting Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards. These standards can be integrated into treasury, ERP and accounting systems, says the vendor, allowing for more advanced cash management and greatly reducing the costs associated with manual processes.