BT and Volante Team Up for Messaging Standards Translation

BT has added Volante Technologies' suite of financial messaging integration software to subscribers of its Radianz Cloud.

BT says the move will help its global financial markets customers improve the reliability of their clearing, settlement and payment transactions processing.

The partnership aims to address the complexity firms have to deal with in a world of multiple standards. Fiona Hamilton, London-based vice president for Europe and Asia at Volante, says: "Financial services—whether retail, corporate banking, investment banking or wholesale banking—deal in lots of different asset classes. The instruments that are being traded have different attributes and quite often there are different requirements in the front, middle or back office.

"That's complicated further by the fact that every jurisdiction, country and region has its own regulatory regime that insists on particular information."

This has led to the growth of hundreds of different financial messaging standards, says Hamilton.

Jon Vyse, head of post-trade and payments messaging at BT Global Banking and Financial Markets, says the industry has begun to center around ISO 20022, but even that is implemented in different ways. "There's no real common understanding between different markets about what to put in a message, what constitutes a message, and so on," he says.

The Volante tools and applications translate many types of financial message between different standards, allowing organizations to communicate in multiple formats. The software supports more than 330 proprietary, legacy and standards-based message types and transformations, including ISO 20022, FIX Protocol and FpML.

Vyse says BT initiated the partnership with Volante when it realized that clients needed this translation functionality. "BT has been in the business of providing secure managed connectivity to clients in financial services for many years ... The whole point of security and authentication is around making sure you don't change the message format at all. You guarantee that the message to be sent is the message received from an authenticated user. There's no translation done whatsoever.

"But we realized the market was moving toward much more regulation, and that clients did need that additional capability in order to be able to collaborate in different markets using different messaging standards. We didn't want to develop this ourselves, so we looked for a partner to provide complementary services. That's where the relationship with Volante stems from."

Hamilton says that as well as integration of standards, Volante have added functionality in the realm of payments.

"So it's a broad range of products that we are bringing to the BT Radianz Cloud, enabling BT customers to leverage that technology to integrate with their corporate customers if they are a bank, or the banks if they are a corporate. Equally, it's as applicable to other asset classes, capital markets, equity, fixed income, over-the-counter derivatives, credit finance and supply chain finance."