What is the IFX Forum?

I get asked the question what is IFX and why is it important. I recently did an internal presentation to my team mates (Architecture Strategy Team) on what I’ve been up to for the past few months. I talked about my involvement in many projects including some standards work. So naturally since I deal with industries I talk about Financial Services industry standards (IFX) rather than technology standards (WS-*). Personally I view standards in a layered manner. There are protocol level standards and then there are the inter-industry language standards.

So let’s give you a high level overview of the standard. The IFX Forum is a group of banks, vendors and system integrators in the Financial Services space that develops and maintains an open business standard. When I say business standard understand that the goal of IFX is to be technology neutral. This has certain implications to this standard. Unlike other standards like ACORD or SWIFT where the messages are clearly defined, it is not the case with IFX.

Think of the IFX standard as a repository for standard business elements required in particular transactions. So it is almost like a data dictionary of sorts. The business elements defined have defined meta-data that define how it is to be used.

As shown above the IFX standard business elements which are called “Objects” in the standard is the base that messages are built on. I personally do not like using the term object so when I refer to business element I am referring to the an IFX object.

So what this standard so special in the banking space? Well I think it is very valuable considering that the banking space is so fragmented in the standards space. There is a specific standard for everything with a lot of overlap. IFX has the ability to cover the majority of the lines of businesses in banking and securities. Secondly, they have started from the business level instead of the technology implementation level. This is huge. Instead of building a messaging standard around the latest technology fad these guys and gals have built a truly technology agnostic standard. So if I would like to deploy IFX as a binary stream or an XML message, it’s OK! This is very powerful in such a diverse platform world such as Banking.

Some Key Focus Groups are Focusing on the Following Projects:

· ATM and Point of Sale

· E-Billing and Payment

· Core Banking

· Credit Processing

· Web Services

 

ifx framework.jpg

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 28, 2007
  While exchanging some emails trying to understand IFX better, Mike Walter provided a list of links that