The Walldorf, Germany, software vendor SAP AG says an application it is developing to help companies link their automated banking systems with Swift could accelerate the adoption of electronic payments and reduce the cost of linking corporate financial systems with those of their banks.
SAP said Monday that it is testing the application with several customers, including Volkswagen AG, to combine complex corporate electronic banking interfaces into a single system.
The system will be available at yearend, SAP said in Boston, where Swift, the global financial cooperative formally named the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is holding its annual Sibos conference.
SAP also said it is offering banks a new consulting service to help banks use extensible markup language to connect their online cash management with corporate financial systems.
More than 86% of corporate finance executives who responded to a survey said they are adopting the new XML message types, which allow the transfer of data among disparate computer systems, SAP said.
But only 32% of those respondents said that they are interested in using this standardization for interbank connections, according to the survey.
"Unified corporate-to-bank connectivity will, over time, benefit both banks and corporations as the corporate offerings continue to evolve," Christian Kothe, the head of Swift for central and eastern Europe, said in an SAP press release.
Swift's uses Internet protocols, which support the XML message types, to provide financial messaging services that connect 8,100 financial institutions in 207 countries and territories.
