Overview of the IFX Standard

The IFX standard is a message specification that serves the need in the financial services industry to exchange data electronically through a variety of channels in a reliable, consistent manner.

What is the IFX Standard?

The IFX standard is a content rich, well-designed financial messaging specification built by financial industry and technology leaders with decades of combined experience; experts who have painstakingly defined, modeled and incorporated real-life use cases to produce relevant and useful business data objects. The result is a consistent framework incorporating best-of-breed design principles and a common object model with carefully defined data definitions. The service oriented architecture (SOA) framework accounts for the interactions between businesses and applications that affect those objects .

IFX provides:

  1. A strong, flexible, open framework that supports extensions in an efficient, interoperable manner without sacrificing predictable, valid results in operation;
  2. Content that is meaningful and useful to the financial services industry based on real-world business use-cases;
  3. Well-defined semantics for communications that are easily implemented using common and emerging technologies without being tied to any particular technology.

 

IFX is built with the recognition that no single financial transaction stands on its own, but is an integral part of the relationship among all of the communicating parties: a payment is not complete until a remittance is sent, an ATM withdrawal is not complete until a consumer's account has been debited, and so forth.

Currently IFX provides content-rich conversations in the areas of:

  • Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment
  • Business to Business Payments
  • Business to Business Banking (such as balance and transaction reporting, remittance information)
  • Automated Teller Machine and Point of Sale communications
  • Branch Banking Services
  • Consumer to Business Payments
  • Consumer to Business Banking
  • Card Management and Services

IFX is designed specifically for interoperability of systems seeking to exchange financial information internally and externally. This means that not only does IFX address the data exchange requirements for the environments defined above, it also allows for interoperability among all of the business areas.