Principles

In FTM, a transaction is a single unit of business activity that changes a financial position or information base. A single message or interchange with an external system can contain any number of transactions Each transaction has a business purpose. Examples of business purposes are:

• Credit transfer
• Payment
• Order
• Remittance
• Acknowledgment

The FTM ISF employs a logical data model for the business content of a transaction. The ISF model is implemented as an XML schema that defines the content and structure of an XML document in which that business content is stored. The ISF representation of a transaction is independent of the content and format of messages that are exchanged over external interfaces.

The ISF model is based on a set of data structures and common business concepts. It is canonical that is:

• For a single notion (for example, account , address, party, or payment) there is only one ISF structure that defines what the properties of that notion are. This single definition is used wherever that notion needs to be referenced, for example as part of the transaction data or within the definition of another notion.
• For a single business purpose (or set of related business purposes) there is a single ISF structure. For example, a credit transfer payment transaction might be initiated over a variety of interfaces using message formats such as SWIFT EDI, or ACH; however, the ISF representation for all of these uses a single credit transfer payment transaction structure.

ISF is closely related to the FTM data model. The role of the ISF is to define the structure of an XML document that captures the business content of a single transaction. For each transaction, the FTM data model supports persistence, the management of their lifecycle, and the management of relationships to other transactions.