IBM today announced the release of a new version of its Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) solution, updated and containerized to run on Red Hat OpenShift and designed to help banks and financial institutions take advantage of the flexibility of hybrid cloud.

FTM is an integrated payments platform that integrates, orchestrates and monitors financial payments and transactions in real-time. It is designed to deliver consistent processing across multiple payment types, enabling banks and financial institutions to bring their varied payment operations onto a single platform for clearer, easier management and better performance. In addition to being engineered for speeding processing and unearthing financial behavioral patterns, the software can also help banks speed the development and delivery of new products and services.

With the latest capabilities of FTM, IBM has modernized the software to run on Red Hat OpenShift, the leading Kubernetes container application platform and the foundation of IBM's Hybrid cloud strategy. As a result, FTM can now be deployed on banks' and financial institutions' hybrid cloud environments. The new version will also be offered on IBM Cloud for Financial Services, once available, enabling participating financial institutions and its ecosystem of ISVs to leverage the payments platform and transact with ease.

"We have been using IBM Financial Transaction Manager for over 10 years and it is a key part of our payment landscape," said Naim Kazmi, Head of Retail Banking and Payments Technology from Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the largest financial institution in Canada. "The release of FTM based on a containerized format, brings the potential for us to apply the payments platform directly into our secure private cloud modernization efforts, which includes OpenShift as one of the cloud platforms. The synergy will help us develop and deploy payment solutions more quickly across our expanding environment."

"This new version of FTM is designed to give organizations like RBC more consistent management of transactions across increasingly diverse cloud environments," said Steven Astorino, Vice President, Development, IBM Data and AI, and Director, IBM Canada Lab. "And in addition to greater control and management, the program's integrated analytics and modeling positions banks to unearth insights into payment trends and patterns that help them better understand and respond to customer behaviors."

FTM now also includes support for rulebooks defined by standards bodies including National Automated Clearing House Association, Early Warning Systems for the Zelle Network, The Clearing House, the European Payments Council for SEPA Instant Credit Transfer and SEPA Credit Transfer, and SWIFT for international payments including ISO 20022 High Value Payments.

The latest version of IBM Financial Transaction Manager is available here.

IBM Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) Solutions bring Data and AI and cloud technologies to help banks change the way money moves as institutions respond to ever-changing client expectations of service and industry regulatory mandates. Challenges include transforming payment operations and controlling costs while meeting the processing and settling requirements of global real-time/instants and SWIFT payments schemes.