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Choosing a Loan Message Exchange Standard for Banking

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One of the items I am working on wrapping up in the next few months is the Loan Organization Reference Architecture for Banking.  To give you a brief summary, this reference architecture is built using the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and BizTalk 2006 technologies. We will build out a real-world scenario to go on top of it to make it applicable to the Banking Architects out there!

So I wanted start to give you my readers a sneak peek into my thoughts in this area. When I started to architect this solution messaging architecture quickly bubbled to the top. Messaging happens at every layer, right? So we had to come to some consensus on what standards we would employ in the architecture. So I sat down and had to take some tough choices and do some analysis to really consider all my options.

We had three avenues we could have went down:

  1. Build a custom schema - Full control
  2. Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) - Established standard in the consumer mortgage space
  3. Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) - Highly robust international standard

Each one had it's own distinct advantages. Below is a high-level decision matrix that helped me make the right choice for our architecture.

So it looks like from this matrix that IFX should be the right choice, right? Well not really. Since our reference architecture was focused on Consumer Mortgage the Vendor and Industry Adoption was key concerns in my decision making process.

However, and a BIG however... This Loan Reference Architecture is built using modular BizTalk accelerators that leverage industry standard XML. If an organization wants to do Commercial Loan the majority of the architecture is there! All that organization has todo is swap out the MISMO accelerator and create their very own IFX accelerator.

To summarize, these architecture decisions really depend on what messaging standards are within your organization or B2B partners. The context in which the architecture is used is a critical decision factor also. For example, if the scenario built called for this architecture to span across all LOB's of Loan (which the architecture is suited for) then IFX would be the clear choice. I hope this helps all of you!

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