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IFX Standard Overview

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IFX Standard Overview

 | Background | Business Messages | IFX Framework | Overview Datasheet (pdf, 57k)

Background

Organizations have long had to find ways in which to connect and share financial information between internal and external applications. The challenge has always been in making sure that information can be exchanged among all of these applications in a cost-effective manner while maintaining the integrity of the transaction.

For the most part, maintaining data integrity has been relatively easy to achieve in closed environments, usually between a small handful of communicating parties working together in defining the exchange. However, interoperability of these exchanges is not easy. It has been expensive to implement and to extend this solution to incorporate new business models. In particular, these closed systems have not proved to be very easy to use when extending to B2C, B2B or a combination of the two environments.

One key aspect to the ideal solution to this problem is to use one common language that that has been designed for large-scale interoperability. This is solved ostensibly through the adoption of XML as the standard intersystem language. XML has been accepted widely and therefore provides the foundation for development towards interoperability.

XML alone does not constitute a total solution. XML is the universal language but what is needed is the definition of what constitutes a rich, value-add understandable conversation between all communicating parties. The definition of the conversation should be flexible enough to handle a wide range of financial transactions, and be extensible enough to implement even the most complex business rules while minimizing the cost of participation.

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What is IFX?

The Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) specification is a mature, well-designed XML-based, financial messaging protocol, built by financial industry and technology leaders incorporating decades of combined experience and best of breed design principles.

The goal for IFX has been two fold:

  1. To use real business use cases and develop content that is meaningful and useful to the financial services industry.
  2. To create a strong, flexible, open architecture that will support extending the protocol in an efficient, interoperable manner.

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Defining the Conversation

Financial Business Messages
While there are many emerging XML based standards out there, the differentiating factor when choosing which to use is usefulness, maturity, extensibility and most importantly, the amount of investment necessary to implement and go to market with a solution.

IFX is content rich. Many other newer standards provide frameworks to plug in business rules, addressing the most rudimentary standardization needs. However, this requires further analysis on exact implementation of data requirements on behalf of those wishing to use the standard. IFX encompasses years of development on the part of industry experts who have painstakingly defined, modeled and incorporated real-life use cases to produce relevant and useful business data objects. Additionally, the interaction between these objects has been thoroughly analyzed.

IFX is built with the recognition that no single financial transaction stands on its own, but is an integral part of the relationship among all of the communicating parties; a payment is not complete until a remittance is sent, an ATM withdrawal is not complete until a consumer's account has been debited, and so forth.

Currently IFX provides content-rich conversations in the areas of:

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IFX is designed specifically for interoperability of systems seeking to exchange financial information internally and externally. This means that not only does IFX address the data exchange requirements for the environments defined above, but it also allows for interoperability among all of the business areas.

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Addressing Uniqueness
IFX Framework

IFX is also made up of a powerful framework that allows for customization and extensibility while adhering to strict design principles needed for large-scale interoperability.

IFX is built with the recognition that not every single nuance of the conversation will be captured perfectly by the objects that have been defined. The content provided can be used as a great starting point, however; the architecture allows for easy standard-compliant customizations that will not create compatibility issues if implemented correctly.

Additionally, the architecture has been designed so that whole new areas of financial conversation can be incorporated so that they are compatible with the ones that have been defined.

The IFX architecture has been built with the following design principles:

With the popularity of the World Wide Web, customers are increasingly more likely to use multiple applications either desktop-based or Web-based to perform financial activities. IFX allows a user to use multiple client applications to access the same data at a Customer Service Provider.

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