Microsoft BizTalk Server Customers Gain Enhanced Access to SWIFTNet

BOSTON — Oct. 2, 2007 — Today at Sibos 2007, Microsoft Corp. announced that, for the fourth year running, Microsoft® BizTalk® Accelerator for SWIFT has been awarded the SWIFTReady Gold Financial Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) 2007 label. The renewal of the gold label coincides with Microsoft’s recent announcement that BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT is now available in the box with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2. By embedding the accelerator’s capabilities in BizTalk Server, R2 customers will be able to automatically integrate their financial messaging networks with SWIFTNet and take advantage of increased automation of corporate-to-bank communications.

By leveraging BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT’s rich capabilities for SWIFT messaging standards, customers across all industries will be able to ensure operational efficiency and standardize global banking connectivity as part of their investment in BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

“Corporations across all industries need to link financial messaging technologies with everyday business process management applications. Microsoft’s decision to provide BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT will help them with this,” said Gottfried Leibbrandt, head of Markets, SWIFT. “This in-the-box availability makes it easier for organizations to achieve streamlined and automated payments activities. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Microsoft to help further achieve these goals.”

“BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT has been a significant part of our discussions at Sibos for more than five years now, and it is a credit to the continual development of new and additional features that it has again received the SWIFTReady Gold Financial EAI Label,” said David Vander, managing director of Banking, Worldwide Financial Services, Microsoft. “SWIFT continually raises the bar for companies looking to be certified with this label, and the addition of ISO 20022 standards to this year’s requirements is indicative of multiple industries moving further toward leveraging standardized business flows in the payments area.”

BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT is available in the box with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 today. Beginning December 2007, customers will also benefit from ISO 20022 support when the BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT v3.0 Service Pack 1 is released. Adding BizTalk Accelerator’s capabilities to the core server product demonstrates how Microsoft is simplifying support for SWIFT standards and enabling customers and partners across all industries to develop integrated applications for SWIFTSolutions. By combining the specialized skills and experience of its partners with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Microsoft will allow customers to benefit from the most streamlined connections to SWIFT.

“Customers and partners need a service-oriented architecture and business process management platform that enables complete connectivity, interoperability and integration from end to end,” said Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. “With BizTalk Server 2006 R2, we have extended this effort one step further, to where the ‘last mile’ of business value is added, by providing out-of-the-box components for partners that need to build SWIFT solutions.”

At Sibos 2007, Microsoft will be discussing how it helps customers and partners address issues and opportunities associated with corporate-to-bank payments processing, corporate and wholesale payments, treasury and cash management, risk management and compliance, anti-money laundering, mobile payments, fraud prevention, and support of SWIFT messaging protocols and standards.

About Microsoft in Financial Services

Microsoft’s Financial Services group helps financial firms leverage technology to amplify the impact their people can deliver to drive business success. We help our customers in banking, capital markets and securities, and insurance achieve four business outcomes: develop relationships, drive innovation, improve operations and build connections. To do this, we focus our products and technologies and our work with leading solutions, services and hardware partners on key areas where we believe we and our partners can deliver exceptional value. Those areas include advisor platforms, channel renewal, core banking, enterprise risk management and compliance, insurance value chain, and payments. For more information, visit http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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