Product suite
The ‘backbone’ to Misys’ messaging and payments offerings is Misys Message Manager. With its origins in the Meridian Link messaging platform, Misys Message Manager underwent a technical refresh in 2005 to move it to J2EE. At the time, it was positioned as a potential replacement for the likes of IBM’s Merva, with subsets of the system having been tailored for SwiftNet services. The first components covered FileAct and Cash Reporting; subsequent releases were for cash management, bulk payments and funds solutions. These new components would negate the need for a bank to replace its entire message infrastructure, with the ability to reside alongside existing systems, potentially adding functionality which was not available within older messaging systems. ABSA Bank and Standard Bank both replaced the mainframe-based Merva solution with the Misys system, on a Windows cluster and Sun Unix boxes respectively. Misys Message Manager is now used by around 300 banks as a messaging infrastructure, mostly linked to Misys’ core banking systems. A few banks (ABSA is one) use it as an ‘architectural piece’ within their payments infrastructure.
The payments solution itself stems from a number of components. Misys Exceptions & Investigations was the first to be announced, at Sibos 2007. Misys explained that following an approach from Swift, it had embarked on building a solution to support the Society’s SwiftNet Exceptions & Investigations service. This was on top of Message Manager and, since this platform already supported FIN, FileAct, InterAct and ISO 20022, it was apparently simply a matter of adding four workflows and a case manager on top to support the Swift service.
It was touted as an alternative to the heavy and costly existing exceptions management systems typically used by large banks. The functionality could be extended and Misys was apparently talking to a number of banks about the solution, potentially to introduce to their own banking partners and corporate customers. From Swift’s perspective, a key enabler for the take-up of the service was felt to be compliant application software. It was expected that there would be dashboard and reference data partners within the eventual Misys solution, with tie-ups to be announced, as well as links to matching and reconciliation systems. The aim was for availability of the Misys E&I solution by the middle of 2008, in line with the overall strategy for Misys which was to provide an ‘end-to-end payment processing environment’. A prototype for this was indeed built but Swift’s E&I initiative failed to gain any momentum of note. Misys’ plan was to add new functionality to Message Manager and release a new product, to be known as Misys Payment Manager. The direction in which Misys had been developing Message Manager had apparently been driven by some of its larger users. Misys’ solutions manager at the time, Barry Kislingbury, suggested in mid-2009 that
banks had been adding their own functionality to Message Manager and looking to use it as a payments hub. This would be ‘not necessarily to glue in a payment engine, but really to orchestrate everything that needs to be done to a payment, by integrating all the different back office systems. It’s about integration and automation rather than chucking out what they have got and buying a nice big expensive engine.’ The main advantage of this approach was that it would avoid the ‘political rows’ associated with putting in a new enterprise- wide payment system, and would allow siloes at the banks to remain in place, said Kislingbury (he left to join ACI in early 2014).
Misys Payment Manager is built on top of Message Manager and the supplier’s portal platform (see below). It is described by the supplier as automating the processing of all payment types, from high-value cross-border to low- value, high volume domestic retail, on the same platform. It spans payment initiation; payment processing including validation, prioritisation, defaulting and enrichment of data, routing, calculation of fees, risk monitoring and reporting; payment delivery, with reformatting for the target execution mechanism such as Swift FIN, SEPA, Target2, Step2 and Swift bulk payments; and post-processing for matching and reconciliation, exception handling, rejection processing, audit and archive. Misys claims that Misys Payment Manager also supports Swift’s Workers’ Remittances service. The supplier says the solution can be deployed as a centralised payment processing hub replacing complex payment flows between existing core processing systems. It can also be used, it is claimed, to wrap existing legacy payment engines, to bring more agility and flexibility. A potentially complementary area is cash management. In the second half of 2008, Misys unveiled Global Cash Portal. This is a version of its trade finance portal, Trade Portal, which sits in front of its flagship trade finance system, Trade Innovation. Trade Portal allows banks to connect to corporates; an early taker was BNP Paribas working with Carrefour. A multi-bank version allows corporates to access multiple banks from a single front-end to manage domestic and international trade transactions, with KBC a pioneer here. As well as standard trade finance instruments, it is meant to support open account transactions. One connectivity option is SwiftNet, facilitated by Swift’s decision to extend its Score corporate access model to include support for trade messages. On the Global Cash Portal side, head of banking at the
time, Guy Warren (he has since departed), said adding cash management capabilities to the trade capabilities was felt to be logical and came at a time when there was ever more corporate pressure to understand cash positions. Facilities include intra- bank and inter-bank fund transfers, bulk uploads, recurring transfers, account balances, sweeping and pooling services, SCTs, a report designer and audit trail. As with Trade Portal, it can be hosted on an ASP basis by Misys. Banks can still apply their branded front-ends to the solution and there is support
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