SINGAPORE, Oct. 20, 2003 — Today at the SIBOS 2003 Conference, Microsoft Corp. announced it is participating in the RosettaNet Payment Milestone Program, an initiative designed to drive the automation of payments from RosettaNet business processes. Microsoft also announced today the launch of its RosettaNet Payments Toolkit, a software solution that will support this initiative and provide financial institutions and their corporate customers with an efficient way of automating the payment process for supply chain transactions.
The toolkit, which forms part of the Microsoft® BizTalk®
Accelerator for SWIFT, aims to provide a cost-effective way for banks and corporations to integrate the payment process quickly and easily into existing information technology systems. This is part of Microsoft’s effort to deliver automated financial messaging solutions to lower costs and decrease settlement cycle times. Currently, the payments process still often relies heavily on manual reconciliation to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, representing significant costs to banks and businesses.
“Industry estimates indicate that for every billion dollars in sales, the cost to corporations alone for settling these transactions is around $27 million,” said Josh Weisberg, senior product manager for E-Business Servers at Microsoft. “The transition to automated processes that use standard messaging infrastructure and technologies for handling corporate payments will result in huge cost savings for both corporations and banks.”
By using Microsoft’s solution, corporations can automate the payment initiation and reconciliation of credit advices with remittance advices, using the SWIFT payment initiation and cash-reporting Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards. These standards can be integrated into treasury, ERP and accounting systems, allowing for more advanced cash management and greatly reducing the costs associated with manual processes. Banks will no longer be required to manage multiple proprietary connections with their customers and will be able to minimize resources required to handle exceptions, dramatically cutting the cost per transaction.
Although the toolkit is aimed at the RosettaNet community — a catalyst for the first implementation of SWIFT XML standards — the BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT and the SWIFT standards themselves are not industry-specific. They can be used by many industries to communicate with their financial institutions.
Organizations also can use a business activity monitoring (BAM) dashboard to track all payments traffic, giving a complete and accurate view of cash flow at any one time. The toolkit includes tools for manual entry and repair of messages and trade errors via Microsoft Office InfoPath (TM) 2003, the new information-gathering program in the Microsoft Office System that makes it easy to develop and deploy rich, dynamic forms for connecting people to business processes.
“With the Accelerator for SWIFT and the RosettaNet Payments Toolkit, the financial community and its customers have access to technology that is simple to implement and that lowers the cost to connect to SWIFT,” said Johan Kestens, member of the Executive Group at SWIFT. “In combination with the highly secure and reliable SWIFTNet messaging services, this provides a powerful solution, in particular for smaller users.”
“Microsoft is committed to a vision of the connected enterprise and financial services value chain. This is why we are working closely with RosettaNet and SWIFT to create a universally viable payments automation solution,” Weisberg said.
About Microsoft in Financial Services
Microsoft is a leading provider of software products and technology to the financial services industry. Its customers operate in every area of retail banking, insurance and pensions, and the financial markets. Microsoft focuses on providing the security, scalability and reliability that the financial enterprise requires. Through Microsoft .NET, the XML Web services platform, Microsoft helps customers act on information any time, any place and from any smart device.
Working with leading software vendors and systems integrators in the banking and insurance industries, Microsoft supports financial institutions in re-engineering core business operations, achieving straight-through processing, better managing all aspects of risk and capital adequacy, increasing efficiency in branch banking operations, and establishing a new generation of telephone- and Internet-based financial services channels.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
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