Infosys Technologies has become one of Microsoft’s leading partners in developing BizTalk-based solutions for financial services.
“We have found more and more companies have become interested in BizTalk because of its ability to help meet business needs in areas like regulatory compliance, as well as address technology challenges around integration – and of course it is cost-effective,” explained Was Rahman, head of EMEA strategy, solutions & alliances for Infosys.
Financial firms that are pursuing projects such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance need to ensure reliable data integration from multiple applications and platforms, and have typically looked at products such as IBM MQ Series, Tibco, and SeeBeyond. They need to structure rules around business processes, and embed them into their compliance solutions. Other areas that lead to the same family of technology solutions are exception management and investigations, where the aim is to minimize commercial risk rather than avoid regulatory penalties.
“We can use BizTalk to create a single logical point in the architecture through which all applications can pass their data, and show that the necessary rules are built-in to that point. That is clearly a good way of demonstrating that a firm is complying with a particular regulatory requirement, and far simpler than the hoops many organizations are forced to jump through to achieve the same result,” Rahman said. BizTalk also has the lowest total cost of ownership among integration tools.
A global firm working with Infosys on meeting FSA regulations in the UK conducted an infrastructure pilot using BizTalk and Infosys’ Financial Messaging Solution.
“It was easy to do with BizTalk because it is so flexible, but our client wanted to see what happened when we began hammering it with the volumes of transactions they process,” Rahman said. “We worked closely with Intel and the BizTalk product group in Redmond and were all pleasantly surprised at how well our AML solution handled their traffic.”
The solution worked by integrating payment messages, allowing the bank to decouple internal applications from the SWIFT network and route all messages through a single gateway, so payments could be checked against anti-money laundering provisions before being passed out of the bank, Rahman explained.
Infosys is also seeing interest among financial firms that are rebuilding their SWIFT connections to take full advantage of the IP-based SWIFTNet. Despite the different business context, the technology solution is very similar to the AML situation.
Yet another application of the technology can help clients avoid the time and manual effort that is resulting from significantly rising volumes in messages, and therefore exceptions and investigations.
“We see a clear opportunity to ease the pain associated with increasing payments investigation and exception,” Rahman said.
In addition to flexibility and cost advantages, Infosys found that implementing a BizTalk-based solution was relatively quick, allowing them to improve their customer’s time-to-market and further reduce the cost of implementation. That is due in part to the fact that testing automation became very easy to set up and scale, allowing Infosys to cut testing time approximately in half compared to similar sized development projects.
Another benefit was ease of reporting. “We also put in place some reporting frameworks so the client has the ability to see information about all their financial messages in a consistent manner,” he added.
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