A leader in the European financing market, Paris-based Natexis Banques Populaires is also at the forefront in the adoption of advanced technologies to automate financial transactions and processes. In its latest move, Natexis has begun using Itemfield in its New York operations to automate its SWIFT messages.

“As one of France’s largest retail banking networks with a growing footprint in the United States, we look to the effective use of technology to help us gain competitive advantage,” said Avram Kornberg, Natexis US chief information officer.

The company uses Informatica PowerCenter for data warehousing and data integration. However, Informatica does not include the generation of messages in the highly complex but essential SWIFT standard.

The bank was replacing its Murex system with the Tradix front-end trading application from Ubitrade and planned to use PAM from Princeton Financial Systems for its back-office processing. The bank searched the marketplace for an automated way to produce SWIFT messages from the data in PAM.

“Some of the pricing was enormous,” said Kornberg, “because vendors were trying to sell us their entire ETL (extract, transform and load) environment.”

Since the bank was using Informatica, he called his Informatica rep, who suggested Itemfield, even before the two companies had formed a marketing partnership.

“We were convinced that Itemfield was not only perfect for SWIFT but that we could find dozens of ways of using it for other operations,” said Kornberg. “ETL is used for data warehouses and we use it for transferring data between systems. It is a much cleaner development process and provides for cleaner maintenance.” 

Kornberg noted that the solution could save the time and cost of manual coding.

“Manual coding is expensive and introduces several potential sources of error,” explained Kornberg. “In addition, each time we might add a message or trade in a new product it would require additional work which would increase our costs.”

To address these issues, Natexis needed a solution capable of rapid and cost-effective generation of SWIFT messages from existing applications. Itemfield maintains a current library of SWIFT, including the annual updates to the message standards that SWIFT publishes as paper documents.

“Banks need to be in compliance with the latest version of the standards,” explained Joseph Schwartz, vice president of product and marketing at Itemfield. “For our customers it is important they have the updated version implemented as early as possible so they can begin to test.”  Increasingly banks that offer outsourced treasury services for corporations are integrating SWIFT messages with ACH applications.

Using Itemfield helps banks simplify their operations, and installation is not a long, drawn-out affair.

“The installation of Itemfield and integration with Informatica was a half-day event,” said Cynthia Burwell, application development manager at Natexis in New York. “It was incredibly easy because we contracted with Itemfield to use their professional services and training.” Developers who worked in Informatica picked up Itemfield quickly, she added.

“I don’t think you could compare Itemfield with other tools in terms of development,” she added. “The biggest difference is between tool-based development and coding. While tools can map data structures too, Itemfield gives you incredible flexibility to work with just about any source or any target of information.” Shortly before finding Itemfield, the bank had bought a Nostro reconciliation package and paid the vendor to hardcode connections from several clearing banks.

“When we saw Itemfield, we realized it could have transformed that data. Itemfield can learn by example from relatively unstructured formats like bank statements.”

Itemfield also guarantees that it will stay current with the latest SWIFT releases, Kornberg said.

“When SWIFT makes changes, you have to do a lot of work, and we are too small to do it ourselves.”

Itemfield supports Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 to enable customers to access and integrate structured and unstructured data stored in legacy systems and proprietary data from across the enterprise. The combination of Itemfield and BizTalk Server 2006 allows joint customers to visualize and quickly define the most complex data transformations from any data format to any other.

“Itemfield’s support for BizTalk Server 2006 is great news for any organization that needs to transform and integrate complex data,” said Steven Martin, director of product management at Microsoft Corp. “BizTalk Server 2006 provides an excellent foundation for creating a connected enterprise. Itemfield’s software builds on that to enable organizations to quickly transform any file format to any other file format, offering customers additional agility and productivity gains.”

“A user of BizTalk can take our sophisticated data transformation capabilities and, within BizTalk, create a processing pipeline for messages in a variety of data formats,” said Schwartz.

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