for XML, Swift FIN messages and ISO 20022, plus custom-built interfaces and links to ERP systems. The company has a Swift bureau service as part of its Confirmation Matching Service (CMS) and has gradually opened up the SwiftNet connectivity from this Citibank- derived corporate offering that has been around for 20 years or so. The first phase was to make it available to users of Trade Innovation, followed by an announcement in October 2010 that it would also now be available to banks, fund managers and non-CMS corporates.
In September 2016, Misys launched
FusionFabric.cloud, a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. FusionFabric
consists of three stages: FusionCreate, which provides APIs for Misys core engines to extend solutions; FusionOperate, a run- time environment where applets can be tested and deployed on-premises or in the cloud; and FusionStore, which will allow developers to commercialize their apps.
FusionFabric.cloud will be commercially available over the course of 2017. In October 2017, Finastra launched its next-generation payments solutions on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. In December, the company also completed connectivity testing with SIA, the European based payment infrastructure and services, firm to provide connectivity to the European instant payments infrastructure systems via SIAnet.
Strategy
The strategy has not always been easy to follow. A common trait across its business has been for Misys to sign partnerships which have then had no impact. This was the case with the aforementioned tie-up with Dovetail. It had all the attributes of a typical Misys partnership: touted as highly strategic at the time but quickly fizzling out. It also caused confusion: did Misys really have a payments engine of its own or not? At the time the deal was signed, Message Manager was described by Warren as a backbone for inspecting and routing messages, rather than a full payments application. ‘There were a whole bunch of boxes we didn’t have,’ including control, investigations and audit. Often, he said, Message Manager resided with other systems such as that of Fundtech. When it looked at partners, the J2EE offerings on the market were limited, he said, really coming down to Dovetail and Clear2Pay. For business and technical reasons, the former was felt to be the better fit.
As well as SDDs, a focus was as a gateway for Fedwire and Chips, where Misys had been working to date with a small company. Dovetail would now become the preferred solution here, he said. He expected demand as these two US entities migrated to ISO 20022 over the next three years.
Uptake and customer experiences
ABSA Bank is a flagship customer for Meridian Middleware. The software is now one component within a group-wide project centred on a ‘Global Payments Utility’ (GPU). ABSA took Meridian Middleware as a routing layer and went live with this during 2007. It formed an intelligent layer to sit above the bank’s existing disparate systems. The emphasis at this stage was on this form of ‘wrapper’ approach rather than an early replacement of the existing legacy systems. Meridian was used to standardise and streamline connectivity to customers on the one hand and to clearing and settlement mechanisms (CSMs)
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However, Olivier Berthier, solutions director, transaction banking at Misys, confirmed at the end of 2010 that the Dovetail relationship had failed to attract any clients to date. The absence of set end-dates for SEPA migration meant the demand failed to materialise and hence the partnership ‘never turned to deployments of any sort’. Financial institutions in the capital markets space were
‘the primary target’ for Misys’ payment offering, said Berthier (who departed in the latter half of 2012). This was particularly in the emerging markets of Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East that were undergoing local and regional regulatory changes. Misys planned to concentrate its efforts on large regional financial institutions and mid-tier banks. Qatar was cited as an example, where a new national ACH, based on ISO 20022 messaging standards, had been recently introduced. ProgressSoft was the main contractor for this project, dubbed Qatch. ProgressSoft’s solution, PS-ACH, connects the Qatar Central Bank with all the banks in the country, enabling direct debit/credit payments via electronic channels. Misys claimed to have seen demand and increased activity in Qatar as a result.
on the other. The starting point had been to provide routing capabilities for SwiftAlliance when this was taken to replace IBM’s old Merva system (the Swift device had considerably less routing capabilities than IBM’s mainframe-based system). From here, the use of Meridian was extended to create ‘a whole STP environment’, said Sean Mouton, ABSA’s sector CIO, services clusters (an interesting job title which reflected the bank’s target operating model).
It then selected a central payments engine, taking
Fundtech’s Global PayPlus, which was used at Barclays (now ABSA’s parent) and at ABSA itself (for CLS). There are now parallel GPUs across the two banks. Meridian is used as the integration, translation and
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
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