Financial Accelerator (A4SWIFT)

Unable to find Installer for Swift Accelerator 3.0 for BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Jay Kinker — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:27:04 GMT

I have received this question multiple times in recent past. Many are not able to find BizTalk's Financial Accelerator for SWIFT 3.0 (A4SWFT 3.0) in their MSDN downloads. This is because all Accelerators and Adapters use to be in different section until last year.

You can find A4SWIFT 3.0 at:
Server>>BizTalk Server 2006 R2>>BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Accelerators (x86) -
CD (English)

Few more helpful links:

BizTalk 2006 R2 Accelerator for SWIFT (A4SWIFT) v3.0 Service Pack 1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3F67A576-21AA-4BED-B405-5825F297EC16&displaylang=en

BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT 2008 Message Pack is available at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925731#DL2

All Adapters and Accelerators for BizTalk Server 2009 are at different section so no confusion there.

Processing SWIFT messages with BizTalk Server 2004, 2006, 2009

Jay Kinker — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:42:38 GMT

BizTalk Server has had execellent support for SWIFT from its 2004 version. Most recent version of BizTalk’s Financial Accelerator for SWIFT (A4SWIFT 3.0) has additional support for SWIFT MX messages.

Next version of BizTalk Server (2009) is coming up with enhanced support for SWIFT.
Live date for MX and MT Standards Release 2008 is 15 Nov 2008.

BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT 2008 Message Pack:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1af19d56-042f-4b90-9d9a-3b12a34dfdb3&DisplayLang=en

SWIFT 2008 Message Pack Install:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?freetext=&productID=0A98C8B2-EF77-4C42-B382-34EC5E1BF50F&categoryId=&period=30&sortCriteria=popularity&nr=20&DisplayLang=en

Related news:

Microsoft Technologies in Financial Domain - SWIFT

Jay Kinker — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:52:44 GMT

SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is one of widely accepted way to do financial transaction between financial institutions. It has over 8,300 banking organizations, securities institutions and corporate customers in more than 208 countries.

If you look at the SWIFT evolution in the market they cover overall market in financial institutions; from securities to cash to treasury, etc. And all of these communities have one common problem – Integration Problem.

They are many large financial institutions and many of those are aware of those problems. The middleware project/implementation that they have been running – most of the projects they have is to do message validation of the messaging platform and are big project that goes long and are risky. They also have problem to find right expertise for that. Even after years, if you ask them today, they are still working on standardization and getting to a more stable system.

In the ever increasing competitive market when everyone is trying do cost cutting, many banks have already started using SWIFT standards for there processing outside SWIFT Network (mostly for their internal branches). They also need to make available SWIFT interfaces for many legacy line of business applications, which is another challenge.

Many major banks are still relying on their legacy systems for validation and processing SWIFT and other messaging standards. SWIFT and other messaging related IT cost is one of major issues. What would you do if your regulators required you to implement a new standard?

One of very common, major and important activity at all financial institution carry our every year is updating their systems with new messaging standards (SWIFT, SIC, SECOM, etc). Many do these updates with help of their in-house IT teams whereas many take help from various service providers. In both cases, doing updates every year remains a pain point. It is a challenge to keep your existing systems updated at the same time when you expand you operations; you will have to start supporting new standards. Interestingly, SWIFT software and hardware becomes legacy the day it is installed. You don’t want to touch them from the day it is implemented!

We will see these problems growing more with time because most messaging standards and still evolving especially SWIFT. SWIFT have already announced that they are moving towards XML based SWIFT messages (ISO 20022) from their existing MT (ISO 15022) messages. Technically, it will be easier to handle XML based messages but will still be one major upgrade for existing system that processes MT messages. What do you do in such situations? This is not the end of it. We will see such major changes in future as well..!

An ideal solution for above problem spaces would need:

- Adaptability: No matter what technologies you use but it is extremely important how adaptable your system is.

- Expandable, extensible system: you would want to work with existing standards but the platform should also be extensible when it comes to support new once.

Here is Microsoft solution for processing SWIFT and to tackle other integration problems using BizTalk Server 2004/2006 and its Financial Accelerator for SWIFT

Typical BizTalk and A4SWIFT solution would look like:

A4SWIFT is not replacing SWIFTAlliance Access (SAA) or any of SWIFT software. It is a complementary solution to SAA or the SWIFT gateway.

BizTalk and A4SWIFT help in:

Reducing complexity
Enable SWIFT Messaging Integration
Easy and affordable to implement and maintain other standards
Integrate with other legacy systems and line of business applications.

Features/benefits of BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT:

It is build on top of BizTalk Server, extends BizTalk Server to provide a reliable and scalable foundation for rapidly creating and deploying SWIFT based financial messaging solutions.
SWIFTReady Gold certified for Financial EAI
It supports all SWIFT standards and provides SWIFTNet connectivity
It can be used to customized business solutions to fit your needs
Latest version of A4SWIFT also supports MX (XML based SWIFT Messages)
Easy to implement and deploy - has faster time to market

I have worked and have evaluated multiple products in market that provides EAI, B2B, BPM and integration solutions. I find BizTalk Server best in many areas of integration domain.

One major key benefit of using BizTalk and A4SWIFT is “ease of maintaining the solution”. It is not only about how easy it is to develop and deploy. Since these are Microsoft products you get excellent product documentation and support. At the same time you will have less challenge for getting technical resources for the project.

Below are some of Common Business Objectives è Required Technologies to achieve è and its benefits

Common Business Objectives:

Using SWIFT Standards outside SWIFT Network
Bring the cost of EU cross-border payments down (exponentially)
Build STEP2 infrastructure for retail payments
Take advantage of evolving SWIFT messaging standards by giving them corporate customers (with or without SWIFT Network)
Replace multiple existing SWIFT systems with one IP-based solution
Provide desktop access to SWIFT for thousands employees
Find a low cast way to manage SWIFT messaging for international trade, funds management, e-bank and workflow
Better integration with legacy systems

Microsoft stack of technologies/products for above requirements:

Microsoft Windows Server 2000/2003
BizTalk Server 2004/2006
BizTalk Server’s Financial Accelerator for SWIFT (A4SWIFT)
Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005
InfoPath 2003/2005
Windows SharePoint Services

Results/benefits:

Fastest time to market!
Lower cost per transaction (depends on how you implement and use)
Growth potential for new markets in retain payments
Development of a web services architecture which allows future improvements and savings without replatforming
End-to-end integration of systems
Can have Thousands user with desktop access to SWIFT
Faster query resolution for customers
Single, integrated back office SWIFT system
SWIFT Messaging from every desktop PC
SWIFT messages created automatically
Long-term scalability guaranteed
Rapid implementation saves time and money
Substantial reduction in human error

A4SWIFT Properties missing

Jay Kinker — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 08:41:17 GMT

One of common issues that I came across recently from some of BizTalk users are:

Unable to see A4SWIFT properties in filter section. This is when you setup port properties from BizTalk explorer and BizTalk administration console.
Unable to get to the configuration wizard after installation of A4SWIFT is over.
After installation of A4SWIFT is over you get error messages like - "unable to deploy assemblies" or "some of the assemblies are already deployed and you need to redeploy A4SWIFT assemblies.
Unable to set database credentials for A4SWIFT

You will not come across these issue when you have SQL Server and BizTalk on same box. This issues pops up when you have SQL Server on remote machine.

My Resolution:

Make sure SSO and BizTalk are installed and configured properly
Use domain users and groups while installaing BizTalk and A4SWIFT. Ensure that same domain user have proper rights at SQL Server level.
Manually deploy A4SWIFT assemblies using BTSDeploy.exe

Processing Multiple SWIFT messages with A4SWIFT

Jay Kinker — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:48:00 GMT

“BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT” documentation has a detailed document which outlines the steps required to processes 1 SWIFT message per file. I am only adding few things we need to do to process multiple messages from a single file. The file may also contain messages of different types.

SWIFT Disassembler Pipeline Component Properties :
Set “Fragmentation” to TRUE
Set “Inbound Debatching” to TRUE

This set of property will create separate output files of one message per file i.e. input file with 4 SWIFT messages will create 4 different output files.

Format of input SWIFT messages :
Common mistake that everyone does is to separate messages with a Carriage Return (CRLF). By default BizTalk will not handle CRLF between messages but handling of CRLF is also possible. Below is a sample of two SWIFT message of type MT517.

{1:F01BOFAUSNYJXXX4321000123}{2:I517BANKDEFFAXXXN2020}{3:{103:CAD}}{4:
:16R:GENL
:20C::SEME//Reference
:23G:CANC/CODU
:95P::AFFM//BICCBIB1BI1
:16R:LINK
:20C::PREV//Reference
:16S:LINK
:16S:GENL
-}{5:{MAC:23456789}{PAC:23456789}{CHK:123456789012}{SYS:1231313}{TNG:}{PDE:12345}{DLM:}} {1:F01BOFAUSNYJXXX4321000123}{2:I517BANKDEFFAXXXN2020}{3:{103:CAD}}{4:
:16R:GENL
:20C::SEME//ReferenceMaxLn16
:23G:CANC/CODU
:95P::AFFM//BICCBIB1BI1
:16R:LINK
:20C::PREV//Reference
:16S:LINK
:16S:GENL
-}{5:{MAC:23456789}{PAC:23456789}{CHK:123456789012}{SYS:1231313}{TNG:}{PDE:12345}{DLM:}}

Installing A4SWIFT on remote machine

Jay Kinker — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 05:08:00 GMT

Couple of points to remember while configuring BizTalk Financial Accelerator for SWIFT for an enterprise environment:

1. Install SSO with BTS
2. Local User/Groups will not work. User Domain Users/Groups instead

Using local Users/Groups for BizTalk Server will also have its own problems. You will get an error message for not able to set database credentials for A4SWIFT. You will see this warning at the last UI of configuration wizard of A4SWIFT.

I noticed that if you proceed without SSO, A4SWIFT installation wizard will skip the configuration part. However, this works fine if BTS and A4SWIFT are on the same machine

In addition to that you need to deploy A4SWIFT assemblies manually using BTSDeploy.exe

Processing SWIFT Messages - BizTalk, A4SWIFT

Jay Kinker — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 10:58:00 GMT

Looking for a tool for processing SWIFT messages for your existing solution? You must give a look at BizTalk and it's Financial Accelarator for SWIFT.

You can work effortlessly with SWIFT messages by using BizTalk Server and BizTalk's Financial Accelerator for SWIFT. Best part is you don't need to know much about SWIFT messages. As expected from a Microsoft product it comes with great user friendly GUI.

A4SWIFT provides you comprehensive Business Rules which helps you in validating SWIFT messages.

If you talk about BizTalk... Its HUUUGE. It can facilitate you in many many ways.

One word to describe BizTalk would be INTEGRATION but it can also help you in many other ways.

Talking about the current example of processing SWIFT messages, A4SWIFT helps you in validating SWIFT messages and BizTalk helps you in:

- Setting up end points for Receiving/Sending SWIFT messages

- Transformation of SWIFT messages into any format.

- Can even populate databases with SWIFT data, as required by many STP applications.

Couple of months back I was envolved in evaluating couple of similar tools by which we can process SWIFT messages but BizTalk and A4SWIFT were by-far the best which could fit into our requirement.

BizTalk Server Home Page - http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.mspx

A4SWIFT Home Page - http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/swift/default.mspx

BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT 2006 Message Pack and A4SWIFT SP1

Jay Kinker — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:02:00 GMT

Microsoft have recently released the message pack for SWIFT 2006. You can get the SWIFT 2006 Message Pack for BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT from - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925731/en-us

Service Pack 1 is also released for A4SWIFT for both versions of 2.1 and 2.3. This service pack is a prerequisite for installing the 2006 Message Pack for BizTalk Server Accelerator for SWIFT.

A4SWIFT 2.1 SP1 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925731/en-us

A4SWIFT 2.3 SP1 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925731/en-us

BizTalk Server Home - http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.mspx

Processing multiple SWIFT messages from 1 file

Jay Kinker — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:49:00 GMT

I am using BizTalk Server 2006 and A4SWIFT 2.3 for processing SWIFT messages. My requirement is to process multiple SWIFT messages from 1 file. I know this can be done by enabling "Fragmentation" and "Inbound Debatching" properties of the "A4SWIFT DisAssembler" but I am not able to do this so far. I am missing something... I will post the details once I successfully complete it - it might be helpful for others. I was not able to find a single document/article which talks about it.

Solution at - http://geekswithblogs.net/jaykinker/archive/2006/12/19/101554.aspx