Volante launches ‘Babel Fish’ for financial messaging transformation

Written by FinTech Futures
15th July 2015

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A ‘Babel Fish’ for financial messaging has been launched by Volante Technologies with the intention of simplifying corporate-to-bank integration and removing obstacles to on-boarding. Like the fictional universal translator from Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, the system translates incoming message formats into something that the receiver can understand.

Volante says that banks, corporates and treasury departments continue to face challenges when integrating disparate payment message flows and dealing with the ongoing obstacles caused by changes in formats due to regulation and new clearing mechanisms.

As well as lengthening the onboarding process this often means that corporates are restricted in their choice of banking partners and banks are turning away potential business because of incompatibilities in message formats.

Called VolPay Channel, the new system is described as an on-boarding and pre-processing engine that manages data imports and exports between banks, corporates and treasury departments. Designed to remove much of the complexity, time and cost associated with the customer on-boarding process, it integrates, validates and pre-processes payment transactions using a streamlined, ‘wizard-style’ guided process designed to be used by business analysts rather than coders to systematically define customer preferences, business rules and exception management process flows.

It also has the capability to pre-process the messages as they pass through the system, allowing for options such as batching payments instructions of a particular type according to pre-defined business rules.

The end result is the rapid deployment of payment flow configurations, with the automatic generation of the necessary code and documentation for customer sign-off. VolPay Channel also includes a test harness to ensure that the final configured operation is in line with both the customer and bank’s requirements.

VolPay Channel uses Volante’s plug-in library of more than 70 domestic and international financial message format and associated pre-built transformations to convert incoming messages to a format the receiving system will recognise. It uses the ISO 20022 data dictionary as its internal model.

“In my experience, customer on-boarding traditionally takes the form of an IT project involving multiple steps from initial project approval, requirements gathering, functional and technical specification creation, customer sign off and finally testing through to deployment. This approach understandably takes time to complete,” said Nadish Lad, director and head of payments product at Volante. “Essentially we are saying that by having us in the middle they are only going to see the messages that they can process. VolPay Channel’s application centric approach guides the bank and their customers through a streamlined configuration process, driven by the bank’s implementation team, resulting in the rapid completion of customer on-boarding and therefore the all-important time to revenue is also reduced.”

Lad said that the vendor sees two potential user groups: banks that “want to be more nimble and remove the barriers for clients and larger corporates with central treasuries”.

Volante says it currently has two banking clients, both in the Americas, but declines to names them. It is currently “advanced discussions” with a corporate that is looking to use the system to centralise messages from nearly 100 systems worldwide, each with their own formats, and then to consolidate its banking relationships

VolPay Channel is a thin client application that can be deployed in the private or public cloud as a hosted service, or as an in-house standalone application.