Payment Standards, or Singing Those Post-Holiday Blues

Maybe it's the holiday season and the never-ending process of typing in credit-card numbers for online purchases that has everyone thinking just maybe its time for payment standards. First it was the Payment Applications Best Practices (PABP) that Visa will be mandating starting next month. Now it is Conversion Models for Payment Message Standard (CM4PM) announced by the OMG and supported by Visa, IBM, IP Commerce, and Firestar Software, among others.

The CM4PM standard specifies, using a UML meta-model, a common protocol and common language for the financial industry to use when converting information in one message into another. In other words, CM4PM lets financial institutions map information in legacy financial message formats into ISO 20022 (UNIFI) compliant formats.

According to the OMG's Finance Domain Task Force, multiple message conversions lead to errors and mistakes that cost billions of dollars a year. The standard also provides a migration path to new message formats. As an example, the CM4PM standard can help financial institutions readily comply with Single European Payments Area (SEPA) requirements without rebuilding current systems.

"Applying fundamental OMG principles such as modeling, reverse engineering, and decomposition has made it possible for this new standard to deliver its value," says Mark Eisner, co-chair of the OMG FDTF and CTO at FireStar Software.

Great, but what the CM4PM doesn't do is provide freely-available Advil or Tylenol for those headaches that are sure to occur when the post-holiday credit-card bills arrive.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:29 PM  Permalink