Real-Time Payments – Any Format/Zero Errors

Real-time (or ‘immediate’ or ‘instant’) payment systems are not a new concept but this year will see a raft of new initiatives worldwide.

This leaves organisations in a state of flux, today the biggest player in the real-time payment race is Swift, late last year SWIFT announced that GPI is now used in the majority of cross-border payments traffic, with 100% of those transactions made within 24 hours (and half made within 30 minutes).

However, the vast majority of payment initiatives are using ISO 20022 as their format of choice.  Initiatives such as Australian NPP and SEPA are already live. Future schemes such as the UK’s Faster Payments initiative to migrate Bacs as well as CHAPs – through the Bank of England’s RTGS – to ISO 20022 and Swift’s announcement that they plan to migrate their payments traffic from MT (Categories 1, 2, and 9) to ISO 20022 will be driving this push to ISO 20022.

This means that your systems require support for Swift MT today but the drive to ISO 20022 will either be approaching or is already there for your flows but these messages also need to be without error.  With each failed payment costing businesses an average of £50 to repair, processing payments seamlessly is a priority for corporate businesses and financial institutions alike, with many keen to focus on improving Straight Through Processing (STP), and reducing their fees.

Whatever the standard the pressure on organisations to support both Swift MT and ISO 20022 and to have these Real-time payments sent without errors has never been higher.

Apply Financial and Trace Financial

Trace Financial and Apply Financial are world-leading when it comes to the challenges of working with diverse and complex messaging standards and beneficiary information needs. Organisations such as eBury, Currencies Direct, Form3, global banks and market infrastructures all rely on Validate and Transformer to address challenges such as cross-border payments, diverse ACH formats, standards interoperability (MT-MX); ISO 8583 and faster payments; the evolution of ISO 20022 and canonical models.

The combined solution of Apply Financial’s Validate  and Trace’s Transformer allows your payment systems to not only consumes/produces your payment formats in either Swift MT or ISO 20022 but also validates your payments by doing the following:

Payments in Any Format using Transformer

Transformer offers PSPs and infrastructure providers the tools they need to create, model and work with multiple ISO 20022 based message definitions as well as to build transformations between ISO 20022 and other formats. Transformer’s libraries capture all of the details of a library in a highly business-friendly way, including user-friendly names and full descriptions for all fields, components, and data range values, and fully support cross-validation rules.

Transformer 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. In this way projects remain clearly articulated and easy to maintain, removing the old-fashioned ‘spec handover’ from analyst to developer eliminates a major source of risk and delay. Testing is fully integrated at all stages.

Once configurations are complete and tested they are deployed into any runtime architecture that suits the client. A Transformer configuration can be deployed into the multitude of technical infrastructures found at a client site including Java, .NET, RESTful services, etc.

Payments without Error using Validate

To make sure the beneficiary payment information is correct before Transformer creates the final payment message Validate will automatically check account numbers, bank codes, Payment Purpose codes, Holiday dates and many more data requirements country by country and bank by bank. Validate can also generate IBANs and BICs from domestic account details. Validate will also check a complete MT103 for GPI payments including the correspondent bank details.

Validate is also able to process single and bulk payments and alert the sender to any errors that are being entered so as to enable correction at point of entry.