SWIFT, the international payments organization, awarded Microsoft’s BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT its gold certification. The BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT enables customers and independent software vendors to deliver solutions that allow financial institutions to integrate into the SWIFT network and automate transactions quickly and at a relatively low cost.

“We want our members to have a choice to access the best technology,” said Johan Kestens, head of marketing for SWIFT, as he presented the gold label to Microsoft at Sibos, SWIFT’s annual conference held in Atlanta in October. “Microsoft is more than just a partner in bringing technology to our clients,” he added. “They are also active in standards.”

Ted Kummert, corporate vice president for the business process and integration division of Microsoft, said the gold certification was a milestone for Microsoft and a validation of Microsoft’s approach to providing financial institutions with a cost-effective way to transfer payments and securities transactions.

“We and SWIFT have a common goal – providing simple and cheaper to deploy solutions,” he added. The BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT will help extend the network, Kummert said. SWIFT plans to provide corporations with access to the system, which could mean a large demand for packaged connectivity solutions.

“This is a comprehensive integration platform that puts business users in control,” – Ted Kummert		“We want our members to have a choice to access the best technology,” – Johan Kestens

BizTalk Server offers banks, securities firms and corporations a connection to the SWIFT network that has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), Kummert said. “TCO is a combination of initial cost, cost to develop, deploy, and operate. We have many case studies that show BizTalk is a cheaper platform. The comprehensive nature of the BizTalk platform allows users to coordinate applications, connect to trading platforms, and then use those connections to build more complex business applications,” he said.

It also enables business users to control the application, he added. Using business rules, they can change applications easily.

“This is a comprehensive integration platform that puts the business users in control. We find that users often go from simply linking two applications to using BizTalk to building new business processes,” Kummert said.

The most recent users of BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT are Banco Español de Crédito SA (Banesto) in Spain and Sekerbank, a private commercial bank in Turkey. Banesto is replacing two existing SWIFT messaging systems from Mercator and TietoEnator to reduce the cost of processing SWIFT messages and be faster in adopting new SWIFT services and message standards.

“Eventually we want to extend SWIFT services, including new standards, beyond our inter-bank relationships to corporate customers,” said David Garcia, enterprise application integration manager at the bank.

Sekerbank is using the BizTalk Accelerator for international trade, funds management, and capital markets transactions.

“Seventy-five per cent of SWIFT messages are now created automatically without any human intervention or manual entry,” said Tanol Türkoglu, assistant general manager at the bank. “The number of people hired for SWIFT operations has decreased, and the process cycle of end-to-end messaging has been accelerated.” The bank plans to use the Microsoft solution as the middleware for all its financial applications.