Every financial organisation using SWIFT messages has to assess the annual SWIFT MT (FIN) and MX Maintenance Standards Release, and determine:

  • What changes have been made to the SWIFT MT and MX messages that are used (or could be used) by our organisation?
  • What are the impacts / opportunities arising from these changes?
  • What changes need to be made to our processes for message generation, parsing, validation and transformation?

Transformer can help at every stage, from the standards upgrade itself, through the impact analysis to the prompt execution of necessary changes: 

Standards libraries maintained by Trace Financial

The Transformer SWIFT standards message libraries – covering the entire MT and MX range, along with a suite of pre-built MT-MX mappings – are upgraded each year by Trace Financial and supplied directly to clients.

Within a Transformer Project, these libraries are referenced in a single central location, so where e.g. ‘SWIFT 2017’ becomes ‘SWIFT 2018’, just one change ensures that the entire Project ‘switches over’ to reference the new standard. 

Impact investigation

Transformer’s powerful ‘Where Used’ functionality assists with impact analysis by identifying every usage of a chosen field within a Transformer Project, including:

  • All message definitions which include the chosen field – Transformer can give details of all the places where a field affected by the Standards Release is used in message definitions.
  • Usage of fields in mappings, etc – Transformer reports on all mappings of the chosen field (e.g. between SWIFT messages and other data formats).

Regression testing

Transformer makes it easy to ensure that any maintenance work carried out has not had any impacts other than the expected and anticipated changes. 

Once a mapping has been created, it is possible to associate many sets of test data with it, and later to execute the entire group in a single run. Transformer retains the successful results of a test as the ‘expected results’ for future regression tests and is thus able to identify every change and highlight them to the user. This example shows a change, a deletion and an insertion identified during a test run:

In this way changes caused by message definition changes, library releases, mapping changes or database related issues can easily be spotted. These individual tests and suites can contain multiple test cases and allow categorisation of test runs.

Benchmark values can also be obtained by running and timing multiple iterations of test runs, allowing complex mappings to be analysed for performance issues.

To find out more about managing SWIFT Standards with Transformer please contact us

The full range of Transformer features can be explored here