Ashish Banerjee, senior solutions architect, Sun Microsystems India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Financial systems are not silos but interconnected systems. Banks electronically transact with otherbanks from overseas for affecting money transfers and with each other through RBI. Lately, with ecommerce (Internet) and credit card transactions growing, banks communicate with other financialintermediaries electronically.

The financial transactions thus may pass through multiple partners before arriving at its final destination. Therefore, to make life easy for all parties standards have been evolved. Standardization is an evolutionary process. This is due to committees beings involved and newtechnologies as well as businesses processes maturing over decades.

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) has been ruling the domain when Mainframes and private networks(VAN, Value Added Network). But as Internet technologies became dominant and mainframes gave way to high performance cluster of servers, XML (eXtendabile Markup Language) based standards started replacing EDI.

XML technologies are cheaper to implement than EDI. Circa 2000 Web Services based technologies became available cheaply enabling SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) to play in the financial transactions domains. Multiple, XML based technologies were developed to address a particular segment of transaction domain. Thereby resulting into multiple XML based technologies like FIX, IFX, TWIST, UBL to name a few.

These XML standards now needed to inter-operate in cross-domain situations. Also, businesses needed to be agile, the composite application programming suites like Java CAPS have been developed to address these integration needs, see www.sun.com/soa. Java CAPS is based on SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) principles.

Click here to download whitepaper on Java CAPS Support for Financial Transaction Standards.