About Zurich Financial Services

Zurich Financial Services (ZFS) are an insurance-based financial services provider with a global network. Their key markets are North America and Europe, and their core business is insurance - general and life. Zurich has offices in more than 50 countries and employs about 62,000 people. In 2004, ZFS decided to use an INCENTAGE Middleware Suite based solution to implement a SWIFT communication solution.

The Background

Zurich Financial Services use SAP as their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. In 2004, they decided to upgrade their payment processing over SWIFT and shortly afterwards to use the INCENTAGE Enterprise SWIFT Bus for securities processing as well. Among the reasons for their decision to choose INCENTAGE were:

• INCENTAGE has the SWIFT Financial EAI Gold label
• IMS is reliable, secure and provides a clear process overview
• The solution could be implemented without impact on existing systems
• After some initial training, ZFS's own staff could implement the solution
• There was no programming required to implement the solution
• INCENTAGE's staff had deep SWIFT payments knowledge

Staff from ZFS attended a 3 day training session at which they learnt how to use the INCENTAGE tools. They also started the design of their solution at this training session.

INCENTAGE Enterprise SWIFT Bus

The INCENTAGE Enterprise SWIFT Bus brings highest standards compliance without the need to modify existing applications. All SWIFT processes are available to any application as a service, including SEPA related services. The application's service communication is based on its own data dictionary or so called raw data. Standards compliance, validation and maintenance are taken care of in the INCENTAGE Enterprise SWIFT Bus. The bus handles all standard updates, thus eliminating the need to reprogram and retest application interfaces.

Inbound

The Inbound solution takes SWIFT messages and parses them using the INCENTAGE SWIFT library. The parsed messages are then enriched to suit the needs of the target systems. Some of the enrichment that has taken place includes:

• Sequence correction: Ensuring that SWIFT messages that are split over multiple messages are combined in the right order.

• Message filtering: removal of messages which were considered to be of no useful purpose to target systems.

• Account numbering conversion: Conversion of account numbers used in received SWIFT messages to the account numbers used in internal systems.

Outbound

The Outbound solution takes data from three sources:

• A SQL Server database which contains manually created payment instructions.

• IDOC format data exported from their SAP system.

• SWIFT format messages from their SAP system.

After enrichment, this data is used to create SWIFT messages for payments, forex, derivatives, securities, etc. Some of the enrichment that takes place includes:

• Conversion of SWIFT message types - MT100 to MT103.

• Wrapping of SWIFT messages in correctly formatted header information.

• Account numbering conversion: Conversion of internally used account numbers to numbers which are familiar to the recipients of the SWIFT messages.

In-House Ownership

Zurich Financial Service's own staff implemented the complete solution. They had no exposure to the INCENTAGE software before starting the project. INCENTAGE's heavy investment into features such as ease of navigation and automatic generation of documentation of the conversion rules has paid off in projects such as this. As well as facilitating the intuitive entry of rules, the software provides navigation, documentation and automatic comparison of versions of the rules.

INCENTAGE has also developed a comprehensive project methodology. As a result of using the methodology, the risks associated with a quick installation and implementation was always fully under control. The project was always fully documented thanks to the integrated INCENTAGE quality management processes. Thus, communication with the development and testing departments was always accurate and under control.

The most important success factor was the highly motivated and competent team which was formed quickly from the experts of ZFS and INCENTAGE.

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