By recognizing webMethods with its highest level of certification for interoperability, SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) has validated the product suite's support for all SWIFT messaging types, mappings and associated best practices; its adherence with established guidelines for Straight Through Processing (STP), including transformation and routing; and its demonstrated support for SWIFTNet connectivity. These standards and protocols ensure reliable, secure and assured messaging between nearly 8,000 financial institutions spanning more than 200 countries.

"webMethods has established itself as a strong partner to SWIFT, helping our customers fully meet the performance and assurance requirements associated with payments processing," said Eric Meirlaen, EAI Industry Analyst, SWIFT. "In achieving our highest level of certification, webMethods has proactively demonstrated its ability to meet the latest standards offered by SWIFT. We appreciate the speed and efficiency in which they've been able to help financial services institutions enact these standards."

For webMethods' more than 125 financial services customers, the benefits of this certification are twofold. First, it helps to ensure that these organizations can standardize on a single integration platform for all of their inter-application, intra-bank and external integration requirements, including SWIFT-based communications. In doing so, they not only benefit from the scalability, performance and security offered by webMethods Fabric, but also from the economies of scale and other efficiencies associated with maintaining a single, fully-integrated platform.

In addition, these organizations can take advantage of additional components of the webMethods Fabric product suite, such as business process management (BPM) and business activity monitoring (BAM), to further automate their SWIFT-related processes and to deliver additional transactional assurance. SWIFT interoperability is also an important component of the webMethods Payments Monitoring solution, which helps to optimize payments operations with deadline, Service Level Agreement (SLA) and exception management features and continuous controls monitoring for regulatory compliance.

"webMethods is proud to count many of the world's largest financial service institutions as customers," said Jim Gahagan, Senior Director for Financial Services, Strategic Business Solutions, webMethods, Inc. "These organizations recognize that our proven performance, full support for industry standards, and flexible architecture allow us to offer turnkey solutions to their most critical challenges. This most recent certification is of particular importance for our webMethods Payments Monitoring customers, who are leveraging our technology to streamline, automate and improve their payments businesses."