VocaLink provides its customers with the facility to translate legacy format payments into a SEPA compliant format, using Artix Data Services, minimising the impact of SEPA compliance for customers.

Artix Data Services will help VocaLink to offer banks a set of cost effective payments modernisation solutions to support legacy payments standards and the new SEPA standards. The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) which came into effect on 28 January harmonised the payment systems between countries in Europe, to make payments across national boundaries as easy as payments within those borders. During the SEPA migration phase the banking industry has to support existing legacy domestic payment message types, new SEPA message types and SWIFT message types for international transactions.

Nick Masterson-Jones, Director of IT at VocaLink said: "Our customers in the global banking community require a payments processing service that can help them reduce the complexity and cost of compliance with new SEPA standards while at the same time supporting existing payment standards for domestic and international transactions." Masterson-Jones continues, "We evaluated a number of options on the market and selected IONA's Artix Data Services as a key part of our technology stack having been impressed with the depth of the product and the support offered. Artix provides us with a fast and cost effective solution as part of our message reformatting service."

Artix is IONA's advanced SOA infrastructure suite which offers an alternative to the proprietary and centralised based approach of other integration vendors. Artix Data Services is an open and standards-based development tool for model-driven data integration. Pre-built standards libraries provide the broadest support for financial services standards, message types and validation rules, including SWIFT, SEPA, FpML, TWIST, ISO 20022, CREST and FIX, with the ability to model and specialise any data format for complete compllliance. By providing a data modeling and semantic validation product with pre-built data models, customers can reduce development time and costs associated with maintaining multiple financial messaging standards.

"Migration to SEPA is probably the single biggest challenge and opportunity facing financial institutions operating within the Eurozone area," said Peter Zotto, CEO, IONA Technologies. "The challenge of supporting multiple legacy and new payment processing standards without compromising performance or incurring additional internal development costs is significant. Customers such as VocaLink need solutions that not only offer the broadest support for industry standards, optimum performance but also reliable solutions that reduce risk exposure in financial markets. We're pleased to be recognised by VocaLink as a leader in this area and look forward to supporting their customers to meet their SEPA compliance requirements."