3 Jan 03: FSTC Outlines Study of Web Services in Cash Management

The Financial Services Technology Consortium has outlined details of its project proposal covering web services for corporate cash management. The project is expected to utilize many relevant XML standards in its aim of identifying opportunities for use of web services in the corporate treasury function.

The FSTC plans to spend the next five months studying the potential of web services for yielding benefits in identifying, aggregating and composing corporate account data and services. Among the stated aims of the project are:

• Detailed use cases for corporate and bank interaction for position aggregation using web services and related technical standards.

• Specifications for data interchange of account data over web services.

• A set of source code demonstrating these interactions in a secure system running in an FSTC member environment.

• An operational proof of concept demonstrating functionality built.

The FSTC will work with a number of interested parties to facilitate the project. Among those who have signed up to participate in the project are Bank of America, NEC Solutions, Niteo Partners, Stanford University and Sun Microsystems.

The project hopes to clear up some of the mystery surrounding the potential for applying web services technologies to the area of treasury cash management. Part of this mystery, the FSTC believes, stems from the broad range of technologies that now fall under the web services banner. It identifies the term as “start[ing] with the basic XML markup language and includes the SOAP protocol; the UDDI format, which lets services identify one another; and WSDL, which lets programs describe their service capabilities. Security specifications and identity services (WS-Security, Liberty, Passport, Identrus, SAML, XKMS) are also developing in the market, with little proven security or interoperability.”

The FSTC says its members “must understand the impact of this technology on existing technical and operational infrastructures, service levels and business models, as well as determine how exiting product platforms and governance models may evolve to benefit from the application of web services technology.”

The area of corporate cash management provides an opportunity for the FSTC to test web services’ applicability in a real-life environment. The FSTC says the area is appropriate because “the demand for treasury functions to become more effective is the main driving force for the evolution of treasury systems, and the availability of web service technologies in treasury systems drives the evolution of the treasury function itself.” It adds that treasury functions in corporations today are evolving to increasingly make use of web services, software intelligence, and underlying XML standards for data and service interchange.”