Electronic Payments Interoperability
Working Group

Organization

The OMG's Financial Domain Task Force formed the Electronic Payment Interoperability Working Group in February 2004 following an informal meeting of the financial industry in November of 2003. The working group is formed as an initiative of the financial industry to take advantage of opportunities and solve problems relating to electronic payments. The group has chosen to organize under the Object Management Group due to its successful history of rapidly producing high quality standards, its neutrality in terms of financial organizations and countries and its ability to define technology independent standards.

Charter
The mission of the OMG Electronic Payments Interoperability Working Group is to enable greater adoption of electronic payments. The Working Group will achieve its mission by creating and publishing electronic payment interoperability standards using the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach. These standards will consist of formal models of interoperability between payment and business systems in a world where multiple protocols and interfaces exist.

Work group co-chairs

Contact information

The Electronic Payments Interoperability Work Group may be contacted via e-mail at payments-wg@omg.org.

New!

30 July 2004

• Responses to the Electronic Payments Interoperability RFI are expected on 2 August 2004 (or, perhaps, a "bit" later.) All received responses will be posted to the Finance DTF web site.
• The focus of the Finance DTF for the Montreal Meeting, at the end of August 2004, will be to evaluate these responses and use the information to form a Roadmap of candidate standards. At least one will be selected to begin execution at the Washington, DC meeting in November 2004.

30 April 2004

• In the St. Louis meeting, the Domain Technology Committee issued the "Electronic Payments Interoperability RFI" authored by this working group.
  

Current work

Electronic Payments Interoperability RFI (click to retrieve the RFI)

This RFI was initiated as a work item in the Anaheim Technical Meeting, February 2004. It was issued 30 April 2004 in the St. Louis Technical Meeting. Response Deadline is 2 August 2004

— The following is an abstract from the RFI's Executive Summary —

The Finance DTF wants information that you feel is important in assessing, defining, and ordering the standards for Electronic Payment to be promulgated by the OMG. The following are examples of information that we anticipate will be useful. However, this list should not be considered exhaustive. Our goal is to be guided by industry to assure the promulgation of useful standards. So, perhaps unfairly, we turn the question around: "What do you think we need to know to properly define a roadmap of standard specifications and define the requirements for those specifications?"

The information requested should describe the lessons you have learned and the problems you have identified in electronic processing of payments, and should provide input regarding current and future payment standards and potential solutions. Our first priority is to make sure that our roadmap meets the business objectives of the financial community and is therefore focused on business drivers, concerns, and potential.

PROBLEM STATEMENTS

Proprietary Systems: As more and more institutions and enterprises move their core business processes onto private and public networks, and as more and more transactions between companies and their individual customers become electronic, there is a requirement for Financial Institutions to facilitate such trades. Financial Institutions in recent years, have built proprietary trading and information systems for competitive reasons and today, with the push of the Internet and the need for interoperability, a more "holistic" and collaborative approach is necessary as electronic transactions are conducted over multiple platforms using multiple security policies, multiple industries, multiple borders and multiple currencies.

Protocol Translation: Within the payment space Financial Institutions will have to collaborate on various types of Identity Management Technologies, based on the size of the institution and the nature of the transaction. While American Banks are clustered around the ACH system, Europe for example has SWIFT, banks throughout the world rely on VisaNet, and any number of other Payment Networks that exist or will be created as clearing and settlement becomes electronic. At the moment, the Large Money Center Banks belong to multiple payment networks outside the United States. As more and more Internet based payment solutions are offered to the market place, banks will need to build portals to handle the payments. The cost of building and evolving those portals will escalate. Financial Institutions are seeking to reduce costs by employing open, easy to use, and inexpensive methods of conducting payment transactions globally.

Electronic Remittance Information: For data sharing in the payment space, Financial Institutions require a common data format, common message standards, and in some countries, common telecom standards. The problem with accounts receivable in terms of remittance information is that the process slows, as the lack of a common data format retards automation.

Scalability: Financial Institutions are of various sizes and types. A model of interoperability and integration for complete payment solutions is required for small and medium sized institutions of various types. For example: How does a Large Money Center Bank interface in the payment space with a Community Bank, which may interface with an Insurance Company, which may interface with a Brokerage firm, which might have its own back office operations, as well as someone using a correspondent relationship?

Security: The ubiquity of the Internet has created a yielding environment for identity theft and identity fraud by using customer personal information from almost any location. New business requirements require stronger security capabilities and practices to enable new services, limit vulnerabilities, reduce security incidents and minimize threats. There is no industry-wide agreement on a security model for transactions that come in and go out (from the perspective of each network). A model for security is needed that explains what we need by region of the world, type of transaction, and business context. For example, the requirements for thoroughness of authentication when accessing a Hotmail account vs. a 50 million dollar fund transfer are quite different.

This RFI Is an Open Invitation to the World Financial Community and their IT suppliers to join us in this effort. This will allow all voices to be heard and a consensus to be reached on a compelling solution. The OMG is providing the facilities for face-to-face meetings as well as electronic collaboration to facilitate the process. In its fourteen-year history, the OMG process has proven to be a reliable way to achieve high-quality specifications.

The Work of the EPI-WG will be complementary to existing efforts, not competitive. It is not the intent of the EPI-WG to duplicate or replace useful standards that are already in place (such as existing electronic payments protocols), or to duplicate efforts that are already underway by other organizations (such as IST, IFX Harmonization, and SWIFT projects). The technology independence of the MDA approach provides the basis for complementing these efforts with business-focused models.

Past activities

Coming soon

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