SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass. – (May 20, 2021) – Virtusa Corporation, a global provider of digital strategy, digital engineering, and IT services and solutions that help clients change and disrupt markets through innovation engineering, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), are among the winners of the prestigious Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and SWIFT ISO 20022 Hackathon. Known together as “the ISOnauts,” Virtusa and AWS won for their solution that uses machine learning to ensure completeness and correctness of data as a basis for smoothing international payments.
ISO 20022 is the de-facto common messaging standard for the financial services industry, allowing payment systems to share data, including across borders, quickly and without loss or corruption of payment information. While vital, current banking practices to date have made adoption of ISO 20022 a challenge.
The ISO 20022 Hackathon invited teams to build and showcase solutions that can ease adoption by enhancing cross-border payments, using the ISO 20022 standard for payments messages and application programming interfaces (APIs). To address this pain point, the ISOnauts implemented an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine using the Amazon SageMaker machine learning framework, exposed over an API and integrated with the Virtusa Payment Sandbox.
This solution allows financial institutions to ensure messages are formatted correctly and the data they use meets the needs of its correspondents and the regulations and market practices in the jurisdictions the payment is destined. As a result, the solution has the ability to ease adoption of ISO 20022 and provide a new platform to revolutionize payments.
"Virtusa is excited at the potential of ISO 20022 to open up many opportunities to improve payment services using cloud technology,” said Senthilkumar Ravindran, Executive Vice President & Head of Digital Transformation and Cloud Transformation, EMEA, Virtusa. “We’re also thrilled that such a distinguished panel of experienced industry experts selected our solution, which uses machine learning and analytics to help improve completeness and correctness of cross-border payment processes.”
The winners were chosen by a panel including experts from the Bank of England, the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, DBS Bank (Singapore), European Central Bank, Federal Reserve System, Innovate Finance (UK), New Payments Platform (Australia), Payments Canada, SWIFT, and Swish (Sweden).