Complex Data Exchange and Financial Services

The financial services industry continues to strive to achieve an improved view of the customer relationship and to bridge product silos, provide advanced online services, and ensure flexibility to address ongoing changes in regulatory and compliance requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. At the same time, the industry faces ongoing pressures to lower cost, increase speed and improve efficiency through the adoption of technologies and industry standards such as straight-through processing (STP) and the SWIFT data standard.

A major impediment to the integration required to meet these objectives is the diversity of data formats within and across the financial services industry including:

Need for ongoing use of legacy systems and associated formats such as proprietary implementations of complex COBOL
Proliferation of desktop applications such as word processing and spreadsheets resulting in key information assets existing in the form of unstructured data which is not readily understood by other applications or integrated in business processes
Increased use of business partners and selective outsourcing that may require conversion between data formats (e.g., equity research, print and fulfillment services, customer service)
Uneven adoption and existence across the industry of multiple versions of industry standards such as SWIFT, NACHA, BAI, FIX, SIC and FpML
Pervasiveness of web-based systems with an array of XML-based standards for both internal and external customer use

Conventional approaches to complex data integration needs have required use of multiple technologies that have proven to be costly, time-consuming to implement, and inflexible and difficult to maintain.

Complex Data Exchange Solutions for Financial Services
Informatica's next generation complex data exchange technology provides a powerful solution for improving business integration across the financial services industry. The Informatica solution offers specific capabilities that address the needs of financial services include:

Support for multiple financial services transaction standards including SWIFT, FIX, SIC and FpML
Support for communications with business partners in other industries using multiple transaction standards such as EDI X12 and EDIFact, HL7 in healthcare, ACORD in insurance, etc.
Support for a broad range of other data formats frequently encountered in business integration including unstructured data (e.g., document formats and print streams) and semi-structured data (e.g., advanced COBOL and proprietary implementations of standards). Click here for a full list of data formats supported.
Ability to embed Informatica data transformation for runtime execution in most distributed software infrastructure platforms including leading integration brokers, content and document management platforms, application adapters, and software applications built on J2EE, Microsoft .NET and native OS environments.

Key Technology Standards Support: