Bank will use Financial Transaction Manager to track payments in and out of Latin America.

Scotiabank, one of Canada’s major international banks, is deploying new software and other IBM technologies to enhance the international transaction processing and payments services that it provides to clients operating in Latin America and other world markets.

Scotiabank will use IBM’s Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) in combination with WebSphere Transformation Extender to establish the infrastructure it needs to process multiple types of domestic and international payment and utilize the transformation capabilities for Swift, NACHA, EDI to improve straight through processing rates.

FTM will enable Scotiabank to provide the new transformation capabilities and greater visibility in the status of payments in process and to simplify its integration with its international payments infrastructure.
The bank’s first use of the new system, which will run on IBM pSeries servers, will be to direct payments in to and out of Latin America, where the bank continues to expand its global transaction banking capabilities, with particular focus on multi-national clients.

Based on the ISO 20022 International Standard Format, FTM gives banks increased process automation, allowing them to access up-to-the-minute information on the status of each payment as it is processed.

“Latin America uses a number of different transaction standards,” David Jackson, sales manager of financial industry products at IBM, told Markets Media. ‘Through FTM, we are rationalizing those into a global standard [ISO 20022],” Jackson said.

ISO 20022, which will allow firms to represent financial business processes and underlying transactions, incorporates an “investment roadmap,” created in 2010 by industry standards groups such as FIX Protocol Ltd., Swift, and FpML.

The Investment Roadmap defines the major categories of business processes throughout the trade lifecycle as front office (pre-trade and trade), middle office (post-trade, clearing/pre-settlement) and back office (collateral management, settlement, reporting).

By making its FTM platform ISO-compliant, IBM is seeking to overcome the traditional organizational and functional barriers to straight-through processing.

Many financial institutions have multiple payment systems with many point to point connections and no integrated view of payments performance. Typical transaction processes involve more than one hundred streams to connect to multiple payment engines.

“FTM is focused on integrating and tracking transactions as they go through the enterprise and creating a common representation of data, which you don’t have to perform bespoke transformations,” Jackson said.

Even with ISO 20022, different standards are likely to persist, thus necessitating integration software such as FTM. “The goal is to have one canonical messaging standard, but the reality is that countries will continue to use their own standards,” Jackson said.