The message formats used for payments are highly diverse. A transnational space (in which SWIFT's MT messages are transitioning to MX) exists alongside a wide diversity of regional and single-country formats, such as NACHA in the USA. Transformer is helping organisations that work in this fast-changing arena in many ways.

Agility across all standards       

Transformer is helping cross-border payments providers like Earthport to grow faster and deliver a more agile service. They can handle a more diverse range of client payment instructions, because with Transformer they can easily and quickly transform those client instructions, rather than dictating a rigid one-size-fits-all API. And in the same way they can provide statements in the form the client wants to receive. Transformer supports their global expansion plans too, by making it easier to handle the many different formats required by agent banks and national ACH systems around the world.

Learn more about Earthport’s success with Transformer here

A strategy for MX payments    

At the infrastructure level the settlement of payments is moving towards MX (ISO 20022 XML format) at a growing pace. In Europe, SEPA is already live for cross-border retail payments, and many other infrastructures around the world are planning similar migrations.

Because many participants want to keep using legacy systems and formats, the initial MX roll-outs are mostly adopting a ‘like for like’ approach, where ISO 20022 messages only use fields and capabilities that have equivalents in currently-used messages, primarily SWIFT MT standards. This will enable a period of ‘coexistence’ of both standards. However, in the longer term the extra data available only in MX will be demanded, not least by regulators, and at this point MT-MX conversion solutions will need to be updated, whether by enriching the MX message with data not in the MT message, or building the MX message directly from payment transaction data.

Managing the multi-year transition from SWIFT MT and MX (ISO 20022 XML) formats will be a challenging requirement for many projects. The rules specifying these conversions are very complex, so attempting to create your own MT-MX mappings could be a huge task.

Using Transformer, you can start with the full set of high quality MT-MX mappings we’ve already built for you. You can quickly and easily customise them to meet specific project needs.   Find out more here

Why Transformer is faster

Transformer offers a fast, code-free approach to building solutions that  dramatically shortens the time taken to build solutions involving complex standards.

The analyst using Transformer creates solutions directly in the intuitive Design-Time GUI. There is no coding stage, even when the required data transformation is highly complex. Projects remain clearly articulated and easy to maintain, and removing the old-fashioned ‘spec handover’ from analyst to developer eliminates a major source of risk and delay.

Users create mappings very easily in Transformer. For example, copying a field from the source to the target message just takes a simple ‘drag and drop’ action – Transformer automatically takes care of any reformatting required between the source and target syntax. To handle more complex mappings, Transformer provides a huge range of ready-made ‘mapping action’ building blocks. These can include conditions, which can in turn be combined into complex logic.  So even really complex ISO 20022 solutions can be created at lightning pace.

You can also run a test on each new ‘line’ of a mapping or validation as soon as it has been added, moving the testing process as far upstream as possible, and ensuring high quality from the very start. Transformer also provides powerful regression testing facilities to help ensure that future standards changes do not adversely impact existing solutions.

Learn more about all of these Transformer features here