replacements. IBM’s old messaging workhorse has been gradually withdrawn, with a number of partner offerings positioned for customers, such as Intercope’s BOX for Swift, typically in German-speaking Europe and with IBM often prime contractor for the migrations. IBM then sought to position WBI for Financial Networks as a migration route for Merva users, and this product now constitutes the gateway element in front of FTM, with the latter providing enterprise application integration (EAI) and hub capabilities. Merva stood for Message Entry and Routing with Interfaces
to Various Applications. Its demise started with the arrival of SwiftNet IP protocols, to replace X.25, with IBM deciding not to adapt the platform. It had been launched in the 1980s and ran on z/OS or VSE. IBM is now proposing FTM for the remaining Merva users,
with a full release to support all Swift messages promised for the end of 2014. ‘It is a very powerful hub and will support all Swift processing needs, so is a perfect replacement for Merva,’ said Maier. Many customers had not made the move, he pointed out. At the same time, plenty have done so. Merva migrations for Intercope, for instance, have been at Erste Bank, Commerzbank, Bank Austria, Germany-based service bureau, Finanz Informatik (gradually moving all of its Merva users, starting with Landesbank Berlin), and Citibank. Others to replace Merva have been ABSA Bank, Standard Bank in South Africa and KAS Bank in the Netherlands. France-based messaging specialist, Sterci, has also claimed more than ten replacements of Merva, one coming at Austrian bank-owned service bureau, Drei Banken EDV. That previous partner approach was not too long ago. In October 2006, IBM had announced its Enterprise Payments Platform (EPP), which was meant to be centred on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach and would allow banks to progressively renovate their existing payment systems
Customer experiences
It is not easy to find reference customers for WBI for Financial Networks. One customer for the integration platform and WBI- Modeler was ABN Amro. This was to connect the bank to its corporate customers, embracing both mainframe applications and B2B systems to integrate payment flows. IBM claimed that the project had seen a reduction in the time taken to integrate new customers from 18 weeks to four weeks. It was also claiming a 38.5 per cent reduction in problem resolution costs, from $58 per transaction to $36. At Bank of New York Mellon, the WBI adaptors were used for end-to-end transaction monitoring and exception management. IBM partner, Systar, provided the workflow component. Citibank was a user of WBI for Financial Networks but replaced this, as part of a Merva migration, with Intercope’s BOX.
and deploy new capabilities. There was an emphasis on WebSphere and DB2, plus support for the emerging ISO 20022 data dictionary, alongside Swift FIN messages. The partners identified to underpin this were Clear2Pay for payment initiation and routing, Dovetail for liquidity management and gateways, Intercope for fax to Swift, relationship validation and message validation, Lighthouse Systems for interdiction and OFAC, Pegasystems for payment recall, Systar for business activity monitoring, and Earthport for low-value cross-border clearing. Those types of companies remain partners but also competitors, said Puthenveetil, as is the case with the likes of Oracle.
He admitted in June 2014 that FTM had ‘less market
awareness than we’d like it to have’ but that IBM was now receiving a lot more RFPs than in the past. For the future, IBM expects its cloud delivery capabilities to
be relevant in the payments space (including via IBM company, Softlayer, and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+), so too its broader mobile strategy, IBM MobileFirst. Anticipated areas in financial services for the latter include commercial payments, exception reviews and alerts, analytics and reporting for bank users, and reporting for customers. Securities and trade finance support is planned for FTM in 2017. IBM also has its Counter Fraud Management suite for detecting, responding, investigating and reporting.
The Sterling Commerce-derived messaging solution continued to feature after the business was acquired by IBM in 2010, sold as Sterling B2B Integration.
In September 16, IBM announced that it was acquiring US based risk management and regulatory compliance consulting firm - Promontory Financial Group, in a deal set to close in late 2016. The transaction is expected to enable IBM launch the new Watson (its cognitive computing platform) service.
Nordic service bureau, EDB, undertook an implementation of WBI for Financial Networks, using this to remove an X.25 backbone and provide connectivity and routing to Swift’s Multi-Vendor Secure IP Network from its two Merva systems. This was to support connectivity for 18 banks, with around 70,000 messages per day. EDB’s stated focus was on no single point of failure, redundancy on a geographic scale, high flexibility, high availability, high security and efficient management.
Publicly available examples of FTM customers included some that were known to have relatively narrow functionality. Lloyds Bank has had a large transformation project involving FTM, within which it is seeking to rationalise a typically highly complex payments landscape. It has FTM for the orchestration capabilities and the SEPA functionality on top of this. IBM and the bank were expecting ‘significant volumes of transactions’ on the platform during the second half of 2014.
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