The solution is designed to combine the powerful service integration capabilities of BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 2.6 RP1 with the financial message customization capabilities of Financial Message Designer 3.4 for BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, and runtime capabilities of Financial Message Processor 3.4 for BEA AquaLogic Service Bus. The new solution is scheduled to be generally available on October 17, 2007.

Financial institutions need to comply with new regulatory requirements, such as Single European Payments Area (SEPA), while lowering the average cost of payments by interoperating with the SWIFT network. Moving to an SOA-based payments infrastructure helps financial institutions to achieve these goals at the same time, while taking advantage of new market opportunities by increasing their business agility.

Colin Kerr, research area director for payments at TowerGroup said, "Integration and interoperability of payments services can be greatly enhanced by a bus architecture supporting multiple payment types. This announcement indicates a commitment to address the growing needs of bank re-engineering efforts."
For financial institutions and corporations which are looking to deploy a SOA-based payments infrastructure that is interoperable with the SWIFT network, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, Financial Services Edition is designed to provide SWIFT message libraries, customization capabilities for financial messages, connectivity to the SWIFT network, mediation, routing, network validation and message repair capabilities.

"Organizations today are facing high costs for their payments processing," said Wai Wong, executive vice president, products at BEA Systems. "No matter where an organization is with their payments initiatives, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, Financial Services Edition is designed to help them build a payments infrastructure which is agile, delivers business value and lowers transaction costs."

BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, Financial Services Edition cconsists of Financial Message Designer for BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, Financial Message Processor for BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, and leverages the rock-solid foundation of BEA AquaLogic Service Bus for SWIFT connectivity and payments messaging standards.
New features and key customer benefits of the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, Financial Services Edition include:

• An integrated design environment that can enable users to customize and define financial payment messaging standards including: SWIFT, SEPA and other payments standards;
• User-defined business logic associated with their custom SWIFT network validation, exception management, auditing and reporting;
• SWIFT connectivity through transports embedded out-of-the-box with BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, for lowest latency, highest performance and greatest flexibility;
• SWIFT message categories including customer payments, financial institution transfers, treasury markets (foreign exchange, money markets and derivatives and precious metals), collections, securities, documentary credits and guarantees, travelers checks, and cash management.