News Release
IBM Provides DB2 pureXML Support For International Payments and Secures Key Win
Provides improved storage efficiency ~ and ability to manage and query native XML
1 October 2007
Boston, Ma - October 1, 2007 - At SIBOS 2007 in Boston IBM today announced that it is to provide DB2 pureXML(™) technology support for international payments initiatives. This will enable finance firms to store data more efficiently, manage, and query XML data in its native hierarchical format. At the same time IBM also announced a deal with Earthport to use DB2 pureXML to help the 'on demand' payment services company manage the way it process payments across its network.
IBM's DB2 pureXML offers substantial improvements for XML data use over traditional approaches, which involve storing large objects or shredding XML files into rows and columns of various tables. IBM's DB2 pureXML also offers unique native XML support for international payments and financial messaging standards based in XML including UNIFI (ISO 20022), TWIST, FIXML, fpML and a growing list of others. DB2 pureXML enables payments system renovations to use a documented external standard directly in commercially available software. It creates a common and consistent enterprise representation of data and opens the ability for a consistent way for software to be developed.
"Financial institutions everywhere are struggling to adopt new regulations and new standards," explains David Jackson, Global Financial Software Solutions Executive for IBM. "DB2 pureXML will simplify standards adoption, allowing a consistent message standard to be used across all developed applications, and with ISV application integration, as well as the use of IBM middleware, enabling firms to facilitate all payments integration projects."
Earthport automates funds collection and delivery through liquidity pooling providing cost-effective international transfers for small payments to the corporate customer, with minimal infrastructure investment, and fast return on investment. Its service is built to an IBM WebSphere SOA and IBM iSeries architecture, run from IBM data centres.
As Mike Harrison, Executive Chairman of Earthport explains: "DB2 pureXML will help us to innovate our unique Universal Payments Network (UPN) by enriching the payment and collection instructions with additional valuable corporate data that improves our customers' internal processes and reduces their costs. This is an early benefit of our business relationship with IBM. We look forward to working together on both this and other initiatives in the future."
IBM's DB2 pureXML greatly reduced the time required to adapt the database environment to changing business requirements. Instead of requiring a week or more to modify a database schema to reflect new or modified data structures, DB2 pureXML can allow it to be accomplished in a matter of minutes. As a result, financial institutions can enjoy reduced system maintenance costs and improved operational and IT agility to serve changing business needs. Firms can not only reduce or eliminate costly application programming changes that might otherwise be required when significant changes are introduced to the data model of a production database, but they can also store and retrieve data faster and more efficiently with pureXML for XML-based message models. Some published studies have shown certain queries may run more than 50 times faster (click here for details on the specific comparative test cases and results).
DB2 pureXML effectively transforms DB2 into a hybrid database management server capable of managing both traditional relational data as well as hierarchical XML data in a single environment efficiently. To help firms leverage existing staff skills, DB2 pureXML supports popular application programming interfaces (including C, Java, PHP, COBOL, and others) as well as industry-standard query languages (including SQL and XQuery). The pureXML feature is fully supported and generally available for DB2 9 zSeries, Linux, Unix, and Windows platforms. In addition, IBM offers several sample software accelerators for DB2 pureXML as free downloads to help firms get started using DB2 pureXML with popular industry-specific XML message formats. See http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/purexml for details.
Firms that will particularly benefit from DB2 pureXML are:
- European banks seeking to adopt XML ISO20022 for SEPA
- Banks migrating to XML based SOA
- Banks looking to improve their value proposition around supply chain finance
- Banks seeking to capitalize on modern XML-centric ISV payments systems (such as those from Clear2Pay, Fundtech, ACI)
Notes to editors:
For more about IBM go to www.ibm.com
IBM UK and at SIBOS: Bill Mew
Email: mewb@uk.ibm.com
Phone: +44 207 202 5769
Mobile: +44 780 824 7932
IBM US and at SIBOS: Sean Tetpon
Email: stetpon@us.ibm.com
Phone: +1 (914) 474-5508