SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a member-owned cooperative through which the financial world conducts its business operations with speed, certainty and confidence. More than 8,300 banking organizations, securities institutions and corporate customers in over 208 countries trust us every day to exchange millions of standardized financial messages. SWIFT has its headquarters in Belgium and has offices in the world's major financial centers and developing markets. SWIFT enables its customers to automate and standardize financial transactions, thereby lowering costs, reducing operational risk and eliminating inefficiencies from their operations. By using SWIFT, customers can also create new business opportunities and revenue streams.
At SWIFT Sibos 2008, Microsoft Corporation announced that it is signing a global partnership agreement SWIFT. The announcement signified a new, higher level of close cooperation between the organizations, under which they will work together to deliver deep industry value and simplify SWIFTNet implementation for customers using Microsoft technology. It is a mutual, commercially-based agreement between the organizations and will open further opportunities for financial service providers and midsize to large corporations to quickly and easily connect to SWIFT.
The SWIFT partnership with Microsoft helps customers realise a faster time to value through a simplified implementation of SWIFT connectivity.
SWIFT, Microsoft and its extensive community of independent software and integration partners can bring SWIFT solutions to global and regional markets, to large and small organizations. This partner network supplies not only core technology expertise, but also SWIFT integration; an approach that allows regional partners to provide the deep level of local knowledge required for successful implementations. The advantage for partner clients is that the Microsoft components required for payments processing and SWIFT integration also integrate fully to the overall Microsoft Office suite of productivity and collaboration tools.
For customers to take full benefit of a SWIFTSolution, they need software solutions enabling greater straight through processing, quicker time to market and a total reduced cost of ownership. Microsoft, its technology partners, and the SWIFT network can be combined to produce an integrated messaging infrastructure for banking clients and corporate treasury departments. The SWIFT partnership with Microsoft helps customers realise a faster time to value through a simplified implementation of SWIFT connectivity, while providing industry leading performance. This is achieved using the Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT which has attained the SWIFT Ready Financial EAI label from SWIFT since 2004.
Microsoft SWIFT Lab for partners
One way in which Microsoft supports its partners and their development efforts to bring SWIFT solutions to market is the SWIFT Lab for Partners. Microsoft's payments partners can test their applications against a configurable installation of BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT which provides connectivity to the SWIFT test network. This reduces partner development and testing costs and can be leveraged to gain certification of SWIFTSolution products.
Did you know? Over 50% of all SWIFT Alliance Access (SAA) and SWIFT Alliance Gateway (SAG) installations run on Windows Server!
