More than 8,500 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories rely upon this validation from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) to ensure reliable, secure and assured messaging between member institutions. The announcement was made at SIBOS 2008, one of the world's largest and most important financial services conferences and exhibitions, where Software AG has a leading presence.

New criteria being assessed this year for the SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold Certification included adherence with current SWIFTNet MX message formats, support for the FTA file transfer interface to the SWIFTAlliance Gateway, and the ability of the BICPlusIBAN directory to directly support Single European Payment Area (SEPA) initiatives.

"We continually reassess and update our standards and protocols to reflect both the growth in messaging as well as the new demands that our members are placing upon the network," said Eric Meirlaen, EAI Industry Analyst, SWIFT. "Meeting these standards requires an ongoing commitment to leadership in serving the SWIFT community. We're pleased to announce that Software AG has once again been recognized for achieving our highest level of certification."

Software AG serves over five hundred financial services institutions globally, including many of the world's largest and fastest growing banks. These organizations trust the webMethods for SWIFT solution to deliver immediate, out-of-the-box support for real-time, interactive message exchange via SWIFTNet Interact and file transfer via SWIFTNet FileAct. Key features of webMethods for SWIFT include intuitive transformation tools, embedded data dictionaries and validators, real-time performance monitoring, integrated exception handling, and automated archiving of inbound and outbound messages.

The webMethods for SWIFT solution is based upon the webMethods ESB, an award-winning, standards-based enterprise service bus (ESB) solution. In addition to SWIFT, the webMethods ESB offers proven support for a number of other key industry standards, including SOAP 1.2, MTOM/XOP, JMS, WS Security and WS-I. This ensures that financial institutions can standardized on the webMethods for SWIFT solution for all of their integration and interoperability requirements - inter-application, intra-bank and with external partners - without sacrificing the proven reliability, scalability and security that the webMethods ESB is known for.