Standards are a good thing fortreasury departments bent on automation and efficiency, but acascade of new standards and drawn-out migrations by variousplayers has left treasuries in a Tower of Babel. A banktransmission to or from an ERP system or treasury workstation mayno longer make sense. The more banks and internal systems involved,the worse the cacophony gets, requiring one emergency translationpatch after another. Now the treasury at Toyota Financial Services(TFS) in Torrance, Calif., has solved this problem by building asolution around SWIFT Alliance Integrator for version 7 ofSWIFT.

“We were constantly wrestling with managing multiple bankingrelationships, connections and messaging formats,” says MarioDelfin, national manager of enterprise cash management and treasurysystems at TFS. “Our core business lines could not take advantageof the greater reliability, security and convenience of new bankingproducts if the formats didn't match.”

Once the SWIFT AllianceIntegrator was fully integrated in February 2011, “we removedthe need for legacy systems to be reconfigured to meet changingstandards, since the middleware handles the transformation ofexisting and new bank interface files,” Delfin says. “It will lowerour cost for systems configurations and maintenance and it willallow us to quickly take advantage of new banking products andsolutions.”