Evolution of Web services approach in SFMS - a case study

Structured financial messaging solution (SFMS) is a secure and common messaging solution that serves as the basic platform for intrabank and interbank applications in the Indian financial sector. SFMS connects around 25 banks, with 500 branches each on average, spread across the length and breadth of the country. SFMS was envisaged in 1999 with MQSeries as the messaging oriented middleware. In this paper, we discuss how the middleware in SFMS has evolved from a proprietary messaging middleware to an open middleware to handle the ever-increasing demands of the Indian financial service industry. SFMS has evolved from being a CUG application to being an open system that can be used by any of the bank´s strategic business partners. The paper evaluates the technologies at each stage of SFMS transition and discusses how the then-existing anomalies have been removed and highlights the power of Web services in achieving straight through processing, across various players of financial system.