They have agreed to embed the intelligent message builder STEFORM in THALER - the core banking system of C&W. This partnership aims at allowing Thaler messaging module to leverage on the STEFORM standard messaging libraries in a service oriented architecture SOA.

This strategic evolution will allow C&W to adapt quickly to market initiatives and new regulations, enabling the client to reduce its maintenance costs.

The Single Euro Payments Area or SEPA has a major impact on financial messaging with the introduction of new payment instruments Sepa Credit Transfer (SCT) and Sepa Direct Debit (SDD). Those new ISO 20022 payment schemes are based on XML and compliant to the European Payment Council (EPC) rule book.

STEFORM intelligent message builder includes the SEPA messaging libraries with the validation rules of the EPC. Furthermore STEFORM can process individual payment messages and bulk them into a file that can be send to the target Clearing and Settlement Mechanism (CSM) i.e. EBA STEP2, Equens, Voca, Stet.

This partnership gives encouraging perspectives beyond SEPA messaging: C&W will further implement STEFORM technology for SWIFT and FIX. Sterci product portfolio also contains STEMATCH (reconciliation & exception management), STELINK (Financial messaging hub) and KEYDATA (multisources market data selection and acquisition) are quite natural extensions of THALER that are very interesting for C&W clients.