A case study of Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) integration using the COIN mediation technology

There is no such monopoly as 'The World Wide Bank' that manages the databases of all possible financial activities. Such a concept makes neither technical nor business sense. Each player in the financial industry, each bank, stock exchange, government agency, or insurance company, operates its own internal financial information systems. By its very nature, financial information, like the money that it represents, changes hands. Therefore the interoperation of financial information systems is the cornerstone of the financial services they support. Naturally the critical economic role and the complexity of financial information led to the development of standards for its management and interchange. Yet standards are not the panacea: different groups of players use different standards or versions of a standard's implementation. In this paper we illustrate the nature of the problem in the Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment industry. In particular, we describe and analyze the difficulty of the integration of services using four different formats: IFX, OFX and SWIFT standards, and an example proprietary format. We then propose an improved way to accomplish this integration using the COntext INterchange (COIN) framework.