SEPA
The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is where citizens, companies, and other economic actors make and receive payments in Euros within Europe. Payments may be between or within national boundaries under the same basic conditions, rights and obligations, regardless of their location. This single market for payments is expected to enhance competition by opening up markets, ensure a level playing field across countries, encourage innovation, and increase market transparency for both providers and users.
Financial institutions are mandated by the European Payments Council (EPC) to support the SEPA initiative. In order to help them with compliance, Progress Software provides a SEPA Standards Library that improves organizational efficiency and the quality of data as it flows between applications. Progress Software adds a level of abstraction above SEPA metadata in the same way that it does with other XML Schema standards such as FpML, and non-XML standards such as SWIFTNet FIN.
The Library includes pre-implemented SEPA models, validation rules and libraries of test cases financial institutions can use to quickly comply with the mandate. The Library mitigates consumer risk from the volatility of the EPC SEPA and ISO 20022 standards by providing a service level guarantee and updates when the standards change. Licensing the SEPA Standards Library enables access to a collection of components and services focused very specifically at the SEPA messaging user as well as the ISO 20022 PACS and PAIN standards libraries on which they are based. The Library includes:
- Implementation of the data model, e.g. the SEPA schema
- Implementation of the validation rules with mapping definitions from the rules to the data model. Data quality is improved by validating transaction data between systems
- A comprehensive library of valid and invalid test instance documents shortening the time for project delivery
- Maintenance service agreement that the implementation will be maintained in sync with the published standards
Validation rules are expressed as XPath constraints that are compiled into the Java code components derived from the SEPA data model. Any SEPA instance document can then be checked for both schema compliance and adherence to the validation rules originated from the standard body as a single operation, or as a precursor to a semantic transformation to some other arbitrary format. Features include:
- Ability to extend and specialize the base standard – Crucial within the SEPA context, the libraries provide an object-oriented metadata modelling environment for easily extending and specializing the base models and associated validation rules to suit the unique requirements of an organization’s trading and application environments.
- Message validation – Validation against published code-lists, firm specific extensions, and generic domain constraints make modifications to the enumerated values in the base standard a quick and easy operation.
- Deploy on any Java run-time deployment infrastructure environment and transport – Dependent on no specific or proprietary language implementation, Progress Software leverages open technology standards such as XSD, DTD, XPath, XQuery, open Java code, Hibernate, and various version control systems. Run-time components can be quickly bound to file, database, and a wide range of middleware transports, can be deployed on application servers, in custom frameworks, in Spring containers, in Jini environments, and with various ESB implementations such as Sonic.
- Reference implementations – A bundle of ready-to-run examples for technical familiarization and to speed implementation times are available. These implementations include:
>> Deployed .java source code and Apache ANT build scripts
>> Associated class libraries
>> Developer reference JavaDoc
>> Instance documents and test cases
>> Integration code examples
>> An instance of the API .jar for run-time deployments - Round-trip support for all versions – The libraries can be used to import custom data models and round-trip test them against all published versions of the schemas.
- Support – Support is provided in the form of software updates, Standards Library data model updates to ensure continued support of the standard as it evolves, online issue tracking and discussion forums.
