OFAC SDN and Blocked Persons Webservice

A couple of days ago I came across an open source webservice on the Internet by www.webserviceX.net that offers a free alternative to the costly process of OFAC compliance. On its website the OFAC SDN and Blocked Person webservice is explained as followed :

" This web services was created to aid banks in meeting the requirements of the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC). OFAC restricts transactions with specific countries, organizations and individuals. The Office of Foreign Assets Control ('OFAC') of the US Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, and those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. ... "

OFAC compliance is a key component to a payment work flow that has an International character. FI's have large OFAC scanning applications in service, but by having a free and up-to-date webservice available this could mean a big potential saving for the "sender" Financial Institution

For more info about the integration of OFAC into the EPB, please check the enterprisepaymentbus.org website in the next few days.

EPB WS-BPEL Draft is available for Download

As of today you will find the first EPB file available for download !!!

You can find "EPB_WS-BPEL_Draft_03092007.txt" under the Download section of the enterprisepaymentbus.org website. This is the first draft version of an Open Payment Work flow described in WS_BPEL, and I encourage every payment professional to provide feedback and help further enhance the work flow. Please feel free to submit your comments to bart.cant@gmail.com

EPB Diagram

click Here - For Larger View


The Enterprise Payment Bus is an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) that has the following capabilities:

• Inbound of a variety of Payment formats : CSV, Fedwire, IFX, S.W.I.F.T, OSI 20022 XML, ... format
  
• Authentication and Security Service
  
• Transformation Service to OSI 20022 XML , Fedwire, S.W.I.F.T MT103, ... format
  
• Orchestration Service through WS-BPEL definition
• Internal Routing and Grouping
• Transaction Monitoring
• Transaction Control Service
  
• Outbound External Routing Service

In some of the future postings, we will discuss in further details the functions of each of the different EPB Services and how they can be further defined within Mule, an open source ESB

Intro to WS-BPEL

Before we dive into some key aspects of the Enterprise Payment Bus, I like to share with you some more information on WS-BPEL.

The OASIS WS-BPEL Technical Committee approved the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification on 1/31/2007. The official Committee Spec Release Candidate can be download from http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/22036/wsbpel-specification-draft%20candidate%20CD%20Jan%2025%2007.pdf.
An interesting article about the Goals of the WS_BPEL 2.0 specification can be found at http://xml.coverpages.org/BPEL4WS-DesignGoals.pdf


WS-BPEL 2.0 is a major component of the Enterprise Payment Bus:

• WS-BPEL is build on compatible Web services standards


• WS-BPEL is an XML based language


• WS-BPEL will be used to define the Payment Business Processes that interact with external Payment System entities through Web service operations


• WS-BPEL will be used to define a set of Web service orchestration concepts for the Payment work flow that are meant to be used in common by both the external (abstract) and internal(executable) views of a payment business process.


• WS-BPEL will be used to define a long-running Payment transaction model that is based on proven techniques like compensation actions and scoping to support failure recovery for parts of the long-running Payment business process.

IBM EPP - Competition to EPB ?

IBM released its Enterprise Payments Platform in December 2006. To review the IBM press release you can click on this link: IBM EPP Press Release.

Is this EPP a close competitor to the EPB ? I believe it very much is. It is an IBM product suite that enables financial institutions to rapidly develop and deploy payment applications across a WebSphere infrastructure. The backbone of the EPB is an ISO20022 XML message that allows for easy transformation and routing. Orchestration, Transaction Status Updates and Monitoring are key components of both Microsoft's EPP and the Open Source EPB project.
One key differentiator is that the EPB will be available as an Open Source Initiative.

During the current design phase I encourage all payment professionals to provide their input in the definition of a complete Payment Work Flow with all its interactions towards other auxiliary and Payment systems.
In the next couple of Blog Post, I will share with you my current definition of a Payment Work Flow defined in WS-BPEL XML and encourage everybody to comment on this project.

What is an EPB ?

EPB = Enterprise Payment Bus

The Enterprise Payment Bus is based on the concept of an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)

The term Enterprise Service Bus was coined by Gartner to define a new type of application integration middleware that is intended to act as a lightweight, ubiquitous integration backbone through which software services and application components flow (Source : Roy Schulte, Gartner)

The Payment Work flow as it exists at Financial Institutions is an excellent process to apply to the ESB concept. Different ESB's are currently commercially available (Sonic,Oracle, BEA,...) For this open source project, however I selected another open source technology : Mule. You can find more information about Mule at their project website