Multi-national organizations that exchange payments in any European country can rely on Axway Financial Exchange as a foundation for compliance with the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) initiative, to improve the efficiency of cross-border and local payments. Axway Financial Exchange allows organizations to use a single architecture for all payment flows, thus lowering costs, increasing agility, and ensuring compliance with global standards - including Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard TS (EBICS). Axway Financial Exchange is unique in that it provides a finance-specific solution with pre-packaged SWIFT and SEPA format libraries, mappings and processes.

As Gareth Lodge, regional research leader of TowerGroup observes, "The creation of SEPA and the increasingly global nature of payments has challenged financial institutions and corporates to update or reconfigure their payment flow infrastructure. In addition, more complexity is being introduced, including mobile and electronic payments, as well as a continuous increase in global volume."

Axway Financial Exchange's support for EBICS TS enables personal digital signatures, which allow organizations to validate and process incoming data automatically. This ensures non-repudiation, improves straight-through processing (STP) and reduces connection and transmission costs. In addition to supporting EBICS TS, Axway Financial Exchange now supports the new SWIFT Release 2010 for FIN store-and-forward messages.

Knowing that some of its customers plan to migrate to the EBICS protocol, Credit Agricole CIB has chosen to put in place the Axway Financial Exchange platform. Sebastian JEAN, Global Head of Marketing & Sales, Global Transaction Banking at Credit Agricole CIB said: "The Axway platform was our initial technology choice for its robustness, reliability and safety. The targets we set for ourselves in Cash Management must indeed lead us to demonstrate our ability to provide impevide impeccable service to customers. The acquisition of the Axway platform -- multi-channel, multi-company, multi-format and multi-service -- offers us the opportunity to open ourselves to a clientele that extends beyond our borders".

Axway works with 14 of the 15 top worldwide banks and 9 of the 10 top U.S. banks. "Our customer base is comprised of organizations whose financial interaction networks span the globe," said Dave Bennett, CTO of Axway. "Globalization introduces complexity; none more difficult than facilitating payment flows that adhere to both local and global protocols. Whether you are a North American bank looking to process payments in France or a Chinese one looking to conduct business in Latin America, the challenges remain the same. Ultimately, organizations will need to adopt a new payment architecture or enhance their current one to be able to simultaneously manage different protocols and message formats."