Sterling Commerce receives 2010 SWIFTReady Label for Financial EAI

Sterling Commerce, an AT&T (NYSE:T) company, today announced that on 21 May, and for the fifth consecutive year, Sterling Integrator has been awarded the 2010 SWIFTReady label for Financial EAI (enterprise application integration). Sterling Integrator is part of the Sterling Business Integration Suite, an end-to-end solution that addresses the critical challenges of B2B integration and secure managed file transfer.

SWIFT certified Sterling Integrator 5.1, which enables secure end-to-end management of financial data exchange, from a single platform, across business processes within an enterprise and externally with business partners. In receiving this annual recognition from SWIFT, Sterling Integrator demonstrates Sterling Commerce's commitment to delivering rigorous adherence to financial standards and improved straight-through processing.

SWIFT supplies standardised and secure messaging services to more than 9 000 financial institutions in 209 countries and territories. The SWIFTReady certification for Financial EAI evaluates products based on their ability to provide SWIFT users with the technology and functionality to optimise financial data integration between their core operational systems (back-office) and the SWIFT community. A critical part of this requirement is the ability to detect and correctly define validation errors to enable improved straight-through processing levels.

"Sterling Commerce is the first vendor to achieve the certification this year," said Eric Meirlaen, Solutions and Markets manager, SWIFT Partner Management. "The high levels of accuracy in meeting the certification criteria and continued excellent record of compliance against SWIFT standards demonstrate Sterling Commerce's ongoing investment in meeting the needs of the global financial services industry."

"Financial services organisations are facing a new era of accountability," said Jim Gahagan, global industry executive, Financial Services, for Sterling Commerce. "The changing business environment as we emerge from a global recession, and the continued importance of regulatory compliance, calls for effective and transparent communications systems. The SWIFTReady certification is one of the means through which Sterling Commerce helps organisations achieve visibility and control over their global financial data transmissions."

Earlier this year, Sterling Commerce announced a new module to Sterling Integrator that provides Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (EBICS) compliant functionality, enabling French banks to fully integrate EBICS transmissions with SWIFT and other existing payments processes within a consolidated payments processing environment. [See related release at: http://www.sterlingcommerce.co.uk/about/News/PressReleases/2006%2901_26_PressRelease_EBICS.htm]

With Sterling Integrator, financial services institutions are reducing complexity and enabling real-time visibility over their global inter-bank and bank-corporate transactions. Managing the high volumes of daily data transfers between SWIFT member institutions is a critical component in any financial gateway solution and Sterling Integrator allows financial communities to transmit and share financial data in a secure, accurate, and highly cost-effective way across diverse business processes, protocols and standards, on a single platform.

Corporate treasuries also benefit from the robust and flexible integration capabilities of Sterling Integrator. As corporates expand globally to improve their financial position and reduce risk exposure, they need to optimise their treasury operations across multiple financial institutions and in multiple countries. Sterling Integrator is helping these corporate customers to transform their treasury operations and fragmented IT environments into integrated, cost-effective systems that drive operational efficiency.

Sterling Commerce will be showcasing Sterling Integrator and its broad portfolio of Financial Services solutions on stand C216 at SIBOS in Amsterdam, October 25-29, 2010.

Further information on Sterling Commerce's financial services solutions is available here: http://www.sterlingcommerce.co.uk/products/standards-certification/certified-solutions/.