The CCI is designed to ensure consistent and accurate clearing at a lower cost as part of the drive for harmonization of settlement, custody, and payment procedures in the creation of a single EU financial market. As a result, all stock exchange and over-the-counter (OTC) trading market participants in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands are required to migrate from legacy, regional data formats to ISO 15022 and ISO 20022 messages starting this year.

"We will see seismic changes in the European Infrastructure with Euroclear's Common Communication Interface (CCI) and Single Platform (SP) followed by Target 2 Securities (T2S). Consumers of these services will benefit from packaged transformation solutions delivered by BT's vendor partners and we welcome the initiative that Progress has made in this area," says Hugh Cumberland, Product Strategy Director at BT, Global Banking and Financial Services.

BT's customers can use Progress Artix Data Services to ensure smooth delivery of CCI-compliant messages across their network, and access a set of model-driven tools to facilitate message development, transformation, validation, testing and maintenance.

Hugh Cumberland notes: "Euroclear's selection of BT Managed Secure Messaging (MSM) gives customers a secure and reliable solution to conduct their business with confidence."

"The move to the CCI is good news for the financial community as it drives risk out of the process, and ensures processes are more harmonised between all parties involved in the settlement chain," says Fiona Hamilton, Senior Manager of the Financial Services Standards Practice Group at Progress Software. "Migrating so many disparate processes, standards and formats onto one central engine is a huge task, but will mean future cost reduction and improved efficiency thanks to the elimination of multiple syntaxes across national boundaries. We will be working closely with BT to ensure a smooth transition for those financial institutions using their network."

Progress Artix Data Services is a standards-based, model-driven data interoperability tool that improves development efficiencies and the quality of data sent between systems. Pre-built and maintained libraries for over 40 industry messaging standards are provided which each include the message syntax, validation rules, and test cases of valid and invalid data. Combining metadata management, transformation and semantic mediation tools based on open Java technologies, Artix Data Services simplifies data interoperability making it easy to model, test and deploy reusable data services which parse, validate, transform and enrich messages for XML and non-XML data formats.