FTM in Detail

IBM Financial Transaction Manager is the solution of choice for financial institutions to streamline and standardize their financial transaction processing systems. It provides an effective architectural framework that enables the integration, orchestration, and monitoring of financial transactions. Financial institutions can thus overcome the challenges in the context of integration in complex environments between several systems, both internal & external. 

Leverage FTM for processing and supporting transactions

FTM enhances the financial transactions processes and helps manage and monitor financial transactions along their processing lifecycle apart from supporting orchestration. Financial Transaction Manager helps in the integration and unification of financial transactions in different industry formats including SWIFT, ISO 20022, NACHA, ANSI X12, EDIFACT, and many others. FTM enables facilitating effective performance management and financial institutions gain greater visibility into balancing financial risk and message processing.

IBM’s FTM solution’s architecture helps manage these critical functions:

• Enabling a streamlined environment that is easier to maintain
• Increasing transaction visibility
• Facilitating reuse of services, data, and processes
• Improving agility to respond to changing business requirements
• Standardizing and streamlining financial transaction processing.

Financial Transaction Manager specifically focuses on the difficulties faced by financial institutions in handling integration in complex environments across multiple systems, both internal and external. It addresses the following issues and requirements:

• Environments with diverse formats and many-to-many connections
• The necessity to follow and manage business transactions along with many asynchronous interactions
• The need to extend the business transaction processing by adding interfaces
• Support for batches with many transactions and independent processes
• Non-functional ones such as security, availability, scalability, reliability, traceability, and auditability

Migration and Compliance for Banks

Banks and financial entities can utilize FTM specifically for ISO 15022 and ISO 20022 migration, making them compliant with new regulations. FTM is compliant with the existing regulations while being user-friendly and provides a framework for the management and integration of existing and new applications and services. This is done with a “financial transaction-aware” integration platform that has knowledge and context of the financial transaction.

Financial Transaction Manager supports:

• Services that can be reused for many processes are made accessible
• The incorporation of a comprehensive set of accelerators that enables rapid assembly
• The integration and modification of business processes
• The maximization of IBM's market-leading service-oriented architecture (SOA) foundation
• Newer and existing financial products

Features of FTM

The highlights and features of IBM’s FTM are:

• Prebuilt capabilities to support/ use complementary products for ISO 20022, immediate payments, SWIFT, ACH, SEPA, check processing, customer onboarding, transaction ingestion, etc.
• Customizable instance to support multiple business units in a single instance where each can configure the solution to its own needs.
• Function-rich interface that holds all SWIFT Interface certifications and offers support for all SWIFT MT and MX messages. 
• Red Hat OpenShift support
• Single extensible platform
• Flexible deployment that mobilizes payment network
• Management of operational risk
• Reduced time-to-market with easy readiness and adaptability
• Convergence and wide coverage of payment processing
• Mobilization of alternative payment networks
• In-built capabilities and pre-loaded features of FTM 
• Supports KYC and KML, payments, and transactions
• Offers multitenancy, open shift containerization, and compliance with newer regulations
• Ensures security and trust

Benefits of FTM for Banks
IBM’s Financial Transaction Manager 4.0.4 integrates, orchestrates, and monitors financial transactions to enable consistent processing across multiple retail payment types so that banks and financial institutions can converge their payment operations on to a single platform. It can also accelerate the delivery of improved financial products and services to customers. 

With FTM solutions, businesses and financial institutions can track, manage, and report on transactions in the face of changing business requirements that demand rapid extension, and expansion. Some of the other benefits are:

• Keeps pace with evolving regulatory and compliance mandates for banks and financial institutions
• Establishes a payments infrastructure with an open architecture to support current requirements and be ready to add on new services and technologies 
• Retains or replaces legacy systems as needed
• Provides agility, transparency, and reduced costs
• Delivers a complete solution that handles multiple payment types through a central payment processing system
• Supports ISO 20022 migration requirements for Target2 and Euro1
• Allows extension to process other ISO 20022 high-value payment systems
• Helps simplify complex legacy payment environments
• Reduces time to market for new customer-facing services
• Improves operational efficiency and has a shorter learning curve for employees
• Delivers a single point of service and support
• Reports and analyzes activity across payment channels
• Enables selective outsourcing by common interfaces.
• Improves agility through optimal product and service selection support.
• Accelerates implementation with shortened application and integration testing
• Increases transparency on transaction status made available direct to customer
• Provides greater visibility and satisfaction for customers into payments and reporting across banks 
• Reduces cost, technical interfaces, business transaction types, and message types with enhanced monitoring across the enterprise 
• Supports message types and business services with reusable tools.

IBM's FTM solution adds the ability to process high-value payments -outbound and inbound. It enables SWIFT connectivity and provides a payments solution that complies with the TARGET2 real-time gross settlement (RTGS) and supports specific ISO 200220-based RTGS payment schemes.

IBM Financial Transaction Manager supports the message types and business flows that a debtor financial institution (originator bank) or creditor financial institution (beneficiary bank) must support to interact with other parties over an ISO20022-based RTGS system. It also provides integration points to other systems within a bank.

IBM’s FTM represents a major step ahead of the earlier/current practice of banks using many different systems to complete high-value payments, either to settle funds between banks or to transfer funds for corporate clients. IBM’s FTM is a facilitator and an enhancement in the shift to ISO 20022 message standards for different Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems or payment schemes.

Mobilize Alternative Retail Payment Networks

Another significant benefit of IBM’s FTM solution is in enabling retail payments to traverse alternative payment networks such as blockchain, faster payments, and regional networks, in addition to SWIFT. This can be done without changing the back-office retail payment system to support alternatives such as Bacs, Cheque & Credit, Faster Payments, LINK, Visa Europe, Mastercard Europe, etc.

It offers expanded message handling for Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst), immediate payments, and The Clearing House Real-Time Payments (TCH RTP). Financial Transaction Manager for Digital Payments for Multiplatforms V3.2.0 helps process an expanded set of messages designed to comply with the European Payments Council (EPC) rulebook for SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst). It also accepts several reports required by Euro Banking Association (EBA) Clearing and helps process an expanded set of messages that comply with the TCH RTP rulebook.

Transaction Processing and Industry Standards

While orchestrating and monitoring financial transactions, IBM FTM provides the functionality to create and collect the state of financial transactions while delivering integration features, including common data and message models based on ISO 20022. FTM has prebuilt capabilities with optional complementary products for Immediate Payments, SWIFT, ACH, SEPA, check processing, and corporate payment services. 

FTM ensures adherence to industry standards that eases integration with new and existing systems. It enables faster deployment of new services in banks to open new fee revenue sources. This solution helps banking clients add capabilities without increasing complexity while ensuring scalability, flexibility, control, and elimination of service duplication.

TechZert and FTM

Techzert has worked in the payments industry for over a decade and has a proven specialization in IBM Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) for Global Banking & Financial Industry. TechZert is an expert service provider and a consultant for these services and has worked with major clients in the banking and payment industry. Its specialties are IBM payment system solutions & platforms including consulting, design, architecture, integration, development, installation & end-to-end support.

Techzert’s specific services and solutions built around FTM include:

• ACH Services: Pre-built industry-standard supporting the processing of ACH transactions with functionalities such as notification of change management, ACH Gateway, ingestion, total verification, validation, transaction management, and distribution.
• Check Services: Supporting payment repairs, image services, detecting duplicates, client profiling, settlements, distribution, acknowledgment, billing, transaction services, and business rules.
• SWIFT Services: Helping process business and SWIFT Messages in real-time
• Corporate Payment Services: Simplifying business logic for captured channels with secured payment services for all levels of clients.
• Hybrid Cloud Environment: FTM 4.0 featuring Red Hat OpenShift supported Hybrid Cloud Environment deployment of IBM FTM 4.0
• Immediate Payments Processing: Internal or external – by implementing a payment process that interacts with channeled service interfaces
• SEPA Services: processing application that implements the mediation process between a client & EBA Step2 System Payment Gateway
• IBM FTM Base: IBM-based FTM for addressing & managing the integration of the application in a complex environment that involves multiple systems either internal or external.
• UK Payments Integration: Supports UK Payments Schemes such as Bankers Automated Clearing Services (BACS), Clearing House Automated Payments System (CHAPS), and UK Faster Payments Services (FPS).

Key Features

Techzert’s solutions and services come with key features such as:

• Seamless and automated financial transaction processing services
• Effortless integration of financial transactions with different industry formats such as SWIFT, ISO 20022, ADIFACT, NACHA, X12, ANSI, & more
• Real-time processing to handle over 10,000 transactions per second
• Self-service administration & operational efficiency 
• Effective integration strategy that aligns with business goals and objectives
• Accelerated speed-to-market and adaptive to changes with enhanced security 
• End to end FTM implementation & deployment services without any interference with existing infrastructure/environments
• MERVA to FTM Migration Services following IBM's announcement about the End of Life for MERVA for ESA and incorporation of the new capabilities into Financial Transaction Manager for SWIFT Services for z/OS

TechZert's Solution Blueprint with IBM FTM

Techzert helps clients evolve their payment processing systems by upgrading their transaction processing environments to rapidly embrace transformation. Given the end-of-life announcement for MERVA from IBM with the option to migrate & implement a new Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) for SWIFT services, Techzert is a prominent player in the move to adapt to the change.

As a pre-eminent partner of IBM, SWIFT & Red Hat, Techzert has the expertise to be a recommended partner to implement IBM FTM for SWIFT Services and help financial institutions transform their payments processing systems. The company implements and migrates FTM for Global Payments Schemes to support ISO 20022 Swift message standards. It has the capability and expertise in the end-to-end implementation of FTM, FTM Base, and FTM 4.0 that supports Red Hat Openshift for the hybrid-cloud environment deployment.