BANKLINK was a founding member of the Data Exchange Network, a group of financial institutions and service providers that exchange account data with multiple banks worldwide to meet their corporate clients' multi-bank reporting needs. BANKLINK now becomes the first and only provider in the network to offer traditional information exchange services on flexible, scalable Web technology through the new generation of exchangeLINK.

As a result, there are an unlimited number of applications for this network of secure, authorized information exchange between financial institutions using multiple communication options and protocols. BANKLINK already has successfully converted its entire exchangeLINK bank and corporate customer base from the mainframe platform to a Windows/Intel platform using Microsoft .NET technology.

Through exchangeLINK, BANKLINK enables financial institutions to provide their corporate customers with immediate access to account information at all of their financial institutions worldwide. This can help the institutions become their customers' single point of access for the information they need to meet their reporting requirements.

Financial institutions may provide multi-bank data to their corporate customers either through a BANKLINK multi-bank product such as iLINK, through the bank's own proprietary solution or through exchangeLINK Corporate, which allows corporations to retrieve formatted files via automated download or the Web. The exchangeLINK Sweep service concentrates a customer's funds from accounts at other banks to an account (or accounts) at the bank that offers the service.

Data exchange services traditionally have been limited to the transmission of account balances and transaction history for commercial demand deposit accounts, using standard formats from the Bank Administration Institute (BAI).

"This next-generation service is really a platform for the proliferation of more frequent, timely and flexible exchange of an unlimited variety of financial information," said Dave George, BANKLINK SVP of Product Management. "By taking in data from a variety of sources and normalizing it into our secure database, we can then create and deliver targeted information to a variety of endpoints, in almost any format required, including file delivery directly to the corporate customer on behalf of the authorized financial institution."

"We are excited to lead the way in the data exchange market," said BANKLINK President Paul Frank. "Enabling financial institutions to transfer and deliver secure, timely and confidential information from back-end systems to front-end systems is the new direction for this traditional application. This then allows for straight-through information processing for account reconciliation and decision support."

Although these traditional services are significantly enhanced through this technology investment by BANKLINK, exchangeLINK still provides all of the functionality that existed in the previous version, including automated sweep and S.W.I.F.T. currency conversion. The exchangeLINK Sweep functionality automates ACH sweep of funds, allowing the bank's corporate customer to not only report account activity from multiple banking relationships but also to concentrate those reported funds from disparate bank accounts into one or more primary accounts through an automated ACH transaction. The exchangeLINK product also provides ability to do S.W.I.F.T. conversion, providing a truly multi-currency global solution.

BANKLINK also is in the process of extending this new service to include connections to Fiserv core processing systems and data centers. This significantly expands the amount of information and sheer number of accounts accessible through the exchangeLINK system and makes it easier to implement the exchangeLINK suite of products by a wide number of financial institutions.

As an additional feature, exchangeLINK uses Fiserv's XRoads product to transfer data in customized formats between BANKLINK and its clients. XRoads helps these customers manage their business-critical data much more effectively 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, improves data flow, and reduces operational cost and complexity. XRoads has nine communication links to the Federal Reserve, processes more than 150 million transactions per month and monitors approximately 17,000 data transmissions per day. Through its use of XRoads, BANKLINK is able to support the operational needs of its clients as well as the growing need for new protocols.