Sterling Commerce gets SwiftReady Financial EAI Gold label

With this recognition, SWIFT provides the financial community with a certification that Sterling Commerce's Multi-Enterprise Finance Gateway solution is compliant with all the requirements associated with exchanges via SWIFTNet. Today's announcement marks the second consecutive year that SWIFT has accredited Sterling Commerce and its Multi-Enterprise Finance Gateway solution.

SWIFT, a cooperative enterprise affiliated with the financial industry, supplies standardised and secure messaging services to more than 8,100 financial institutions in 208 countries and territories. In 2006, more than 2.86 billion messages - a 13.8 per cent increase over 2005 - were exchanged via the SWIFTNet network. To assist the financial community in selecting software to enhance these messaging services, SWIFT evaluates the software of its partners according to clearly defined technical and functional criteria. At the highest level, the Gold label is awarded to solutions that are totally compatible with the criteria defined by SWIFT, including the implementation of SWIFT standards.

"Congratulations to Sterling Commerce on the successful renewal of the SWIFTReady Gold label for Financial EAI. We were particularly impressed with the completeness of the EAI capabilities in the MEFG product; this is especially important as the industry, in partnership with SWIFT, drives forward integration initiatives such as SCORE and other SWIFTNet solutions," said Eric Meirlaen, financial EAI program manager for SWIFT.

"The SWIFTReady labeling certification is based on a tightly defined set of detailed criteria. As the highest level of achievement, the 'Gold' label rewards EAI products for full compliance with SWIFT Standards and SWIFTNet messaging services," Meirlaen said.

The Multi-Enterprise Finance Gateway from Sterling Commerce is a complete financial gateway solution for payments and other financial inter-enterprise communications. It provides the translation required to secure data deelivery of multiple communication types to multiple customers over different network and media standards, including SWIFT FIN and XML; message and file support; and a roadmap for building in additional domestic and international standards. In addition to SWIFT standards, MEFG-supported financial services standards include, but are not limited to, the following:

• FIX, FIXML, FpML, IFX
• ISO 20022, and 150222, including TWIST
• NACHA ACH
• TARGET2
• EBA STEP2

MEFG supports batch and real-time protocols, including FTP and FTP/S; SSH/SFTP; Connect:Direct; HTTP/s; dial-up communications; SMTP; SOAP, MQ, JMS and MSMQ messaging; AS2; and RosettaNet.

"Sterling Commerce continues to offer the only application-agnostic financial gateway in the market with full SWIFT connectivity," said Richard Spong, Industry Marketing Manager, Financial Services for Sterling Commerce EMEA. "This year the banking industry faces a period of certain change, and banks need to ensure that their ability to react to new regulatory and commercial pressures is not restricted by their IT systems. With the Multi-Enterprise Finance Gateway, Sterling Commerce offers a SWIFT-compliant business-to-business (B2B) communications and financial transaction gateway with the flexibility and efficiency to deliver that agility in the financial communications space."

For any company engaging in financial transmissions, the Multi-Enterprise Finance Gateway provides a single window to view financial services traffic under a common dashboard. The gateway automates the processing and routing of financial data against business process rules, which can increase efficiency through techniques such as the automatic bulking of multiple payments with a common destination. For banks and corporate organisations alike, the Multi-Enterprise Finance Gateway helps remove the barriers to collaboration and increase visibility through the translation of all communications across different standards and formats.