Financial Services Industry:Communication Protocols Used
EDI is widely used by commercial firms to initiate transactions with their financial services counterparties. EDI facilitates financial supply chain transactions such as the direct deposit of payroll checks by employers, the direct debit of consumer accounts, and the electronic payment of government taxes by businesses. With the increasing emphasis on security, the financial services industry has added a number of secure communication protocols along with the more common ones used for other industries.
While many organizations use FTP and FTPs, others use AS2, OFTP, ZENGIN, HTTP/S, MQ Series, and VPNs. The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol is an electronic communications protocol initiated in 1992 for international real-time exchange of information related to the securities transactions and markets. In Europe, specifically in France and Germany, EBICS has gained some acceptance as the transmission protocol for corporate-to-bank communication using the XML format which supports the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) initiative to standardize clearing protocols in the interbank networks.
