Financial Transaction Manager overview

Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) addresses a number of issues that financial institutions encounter when they attempt to manage the integration of their applications in a complex environment that involves multiple systems. These systems might be both internal and external to the financial institution.

Some of the common issues are shown in the following list:
  • Environments with diverse formats and many-to-many connections.
  • The need to track and manage the progress of business transactions through series of asynchronous interactions.
  • Extensibility, that is, the need to easily add more interfaces.
  • Support of multiple transactions with independent processes.
  • Batches that contain several transactions with independent processes.
  • Accelerated development.
  • High availability, security, reliability, and scalability.
  • Audit and traceability requirements.
FTM provides a framework that you can use to manage the integration of existing and new applications and services through a financial-markets-enabled integration platform. Some characteristics of FTM are shown in the following list:
  • Supports the provision of services that can be reused across many processes.
  • Enables the rapid assembly, integration, and modification of business processes.
  • Employs market-leading SOA foundation products from IBM®.
FTM consists of the following modules that can be deployed:
  • An operational database.
  • A financial transaction processing platform that runs in an integration node.
  • The Operations and Administration Console, which runs as an enterprise application.
  • Sample applications.

The payment processing platform can be extended to build complex payment processing applications. This documentation describes how to deploy and use only the basic platform and the sample applications. A more complex application might require extra steps that are beyond the scope of this documentation.

The Financial Transaction Manager platform (FTM) is composed of several components, including the ones that are shown in the following list:
  • FTM data model (includes installation scripts).
  • FTM Internal Standard Format (ISF).
  • FTM development methodology.
  • FTM core IBM App Connect Enterprise artifacts.
  • FTM Operations and Administration Console.
  • FTM Rational® Software Architect plug-ins.
  • FTM Generic FSM Model.
  • FTM transformation pack.
  • FTM sample application.
The following figure shows how these components typically interact in an FTM solution.
Figure 1. FTM components
FTM solution overview
The following figure shows how transmissions are processed by FTM.
Diagram that shows the flow of transmission processing by FTM