This certification designates BEA as a leading EAI vendor and affords new and existing SWIFT customers the opportunity to leverage BEA technology to connect to SWIFT. Upon completing a rigorous testing process with C24, the financial services messaging standards specialists, BEA was awarded the Gold Label certification. This award marks a major milestone in the collaboration between BEA and SWIFT and also brings significant validation to the BEA approach to providing financial institutions with improved connectivity and operational efficiencies through the use of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

"Today's financial services marketplace is driven by consolidation and escalating customer demands," said André Ros, Financial Services business development manager, EMEA, BEA Systems. "Against this backdrop financial services providers are compelled to further automate their processes, improve integration between trading partners, and replace siloed infrastructure."

With this certification, BEA can provide financial institutions with a comprehensive platform that helps integrate and automate the processing of complex SWIFT messages, thereby bridging the gap between their internal systems and SWIFTNet. The new financial services messaging and connectivity framework is designed to speed straight-through processing, electronic communications and payments and provide financial institutions with the agility to capitalise on future opportunities for growth, as embodied by new SWIFTNet services.

Leveraging SOA For Competitive Advantage
SOA is an IT strategy that organises enterprise application functions into interoperable standards based services that can be combined and reused quickly according to business needs. As a standards organisation and a messaging provider focusing on the inter-institution space, SWIFT enables and ensures the respect of SOAs in the financial community. It aligns the adapters in its technology to these standards based services and promotes adoption of industry standards via partnerships with leading application infrastructure vendors such as BEA. The new financial services messaging and connectivity framework helps eliminate redundancy and promote consolidation and reuse of services, key benefits behind SOA.

"We appreciate the enthusiasm and ability shown by BEA to quickly deliver SWIFT-ready advanced technology to our clients to allow customer value creation and get mileage out of their SOA implementations," says Joel Ludvigsen, head of partner solutions at SWIFT. "We look forward to exploring new opportunities together and are pleased to award the SWIFTReady Gold Financial EAI label 2005 to BEA."

"The SWIFT messaging system is all about communication - applications that communicate internally and externally. With this accreditation, BEA will continue to work with financial institutions across the globe to consolidate SWIFT messaging for multiple back-office functions onto a single platform and facilitate compliance with existing and emerging standards," Ros concludes.

With this new financial services messaging and connectivity framework, BEA provides financial institutions with the ability to handle high volumes of messages in conjunction with automated workflow and back-end system integration. It is comprised of specialised work flow processes for incoming and outgoing message processing. It also includes features such as exception management, BIC/BIC+ integration, parsing, enrichment and process orchestration, based on a highly flexible design and with development toolkits for client application customisation.

The financial services messaging and connectivity framework is distributed with industry standard data model libraries supporting e.g. full syntactic and semantic validation rules for the entire SWIFT FIN message type library. It includes the meta-data management toolkit technology to extend and specialise from these standards, and the same technology base to support ISO20022, FpML, FIX and CREST messaging requirements.

The syntax, semantics and market practice rules of SWIFT standards can be extremely complex and therefore costly to develop, integrate and maintain. The new financial services messaging and connectivity framework delivers an efficient deployment platform based on a proven, well architected, highly scalable, high performance SOA platform for SWIFT-enabled applications.