Overview

FTM Common Services offers customers, partners, and third-party software providers a robust array of core runtimes, services, templates, message maps, workflows, and more.

These components empower you to expand the capabilities of the FTM payment processing platform in various ways, including adding support for payment schemes that IBM® does not offer. These core services, templates, and references are the common foundation that IBM uses to build its industry solutions for processing payments such as:

Check
EURO1
CBPR+
Fedwire
Nacha
NBO
RIX
T2
TARGET DKK
TCH RTP

Common Services contains the core building blocks that IBM uses to create each of its payment solutions. These core services enable the creation of custom solutions by using the same foundations that are found in other FTM solutions. IBM updates these core services with more features that are common across two or more solutions as new releases become available.

Core runtimes

When you develop a payment engine, Common Services offers a set of core runtimes to fulfill your payment processing requirements. These runtimes are the core components that are used for processing payment instructions, bulking outbound payments, orchestrating workflows, and managing risk.

The following list is a high-level description of the runtime categories that are provided by Common Services:

Workflow orchestration

IBM App Connect implementations, along with Transaction Server, offer a robust array of features for orchestrating messages and managing payment workflows and events.

Payment processing

Various runtimes are available for message loading, validation, and enrichment, which ensures data integrity and availability. These runtimes are shown in the following list:

Gateway Server: This runtime processes high volumes of transmissions for payments that originate from the financial institution or are destined for a receiving financial institution. It offers a robust array of options for managing these payments based on bank requirements.
Transaction Server: This runtime serves as a high-volume workflow orchestrator and event manager for payment processing.
Business Rules Server: This runtime provides robust rules for business analysts to ensure the data integrity of payment messages. It empowers analysts to enrich data as the messages are being processed.
Distribution: This runtime repackages payments that are going to different destinations. It is used to do bulking or to control transit payments that are destined to different financial institutions.
Services Framework: This runtime provides a generic runtime that you can use to create custom jobs for payment management and seamlessly integrate them within the payment workflow.
Risk: This runtime manages risk for payments as they progress through the payment workflow. Risk can include exposure limits (monitors) and payment filters.
Settlement: This runtime tracks payment amounts that flow in and out of FTM, providing a real-time view of intraday balances.
Web Services: This runtime provides a set of APIs that you can use to integrate payment processing into your internal applications.

Operation management

Common Services provides a set of user interfaces for handling the day-to-day operations for payment processing.

Reference implementation and samples

Common Services provides a robust set of samples and references that give you the ability to quickly configure a payment system based on your processing requirements. These samples and references are found in a library of artifacts. The following list shows the most commonly used set of samples and references:

IBM App Connect workflows: You can view, deploy, or extend the IBM App Connect reference workflows to meet your requirements. By using the IBM App Connect toolkit, you can import reference projects, customize functions, update state machines, and extend configurations to suit your processing needs.
Event management: Transaction Server is the event orchestrator. FTM provides a set of sample scheduler XML documents as a reference for processing payments. These references control events to Risk, Services Framework, Distribution, and Settlement. You can update them to control which events run based on your processing requirements.
Rules: The rules engine is the heart of the workflow and enforces data integrity. FTM provides a set of artifacts that show payment workflows, validation, and enrichment for payment processing.
System configurations: FTM is a large processing engine that offers you a wide variety of payment processing configurations. FTM provides a set of tools, such as the Data Setup Utility and configurations in Microsoft Excel workbooks to help you extend and accelerate your product configuration.
User exits: FTM is extensible so you can add custom behaviors in your payment processing workflow. Many of the runtimes provide sample user exits that show how you can extend certain behaviors when payments are processed.
Tasks: Services Framework offers a runtime environment that you can use to add other processing behaviors within the payment workflow, which can sometimes be complex. FTM provides a set of APIs and sample tasks to demonstrate how you can use Services Framework to enhance the payment processing behavior.
Message map library: Common Services provides a rich library of mappers that show how payment instructions such as pacs.008 or pain.001 messages can be processed and mapped to and from the normalized message format (ISF).