Integrion eyes OFX convergence
NEW ORLEANS, Dec 5 Some 15 months after its launch by a group of major U.S. banks and International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), the Integrion Financial Network has weathered the usual growing pains and now is aiming for a convergence of its "Gold" technical standard with that of the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) backed by Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and its partners.
"We're both now committed to finding a way to inter-operate with each other," Bill Fenimore, managing director and chief executive said during an interview.
Fenimore, interviewed at the Bank Administration Institute 1997 Retail Delivery Conference, was clearly pleased to hear that Microsoft and its partners were "working with the Gold interchange standard" to bring about alignment and convergence with OFX, as Microsoft chairman and chief executive Bill Gates put it in an address to the conference via satellite link earlier in the week.
Integrion's Gold Message Standard, as it is formallly known, connects the "front end" where financial services are accessed to the "back end" where the bank's data are stored.
Making Gold compatible with OFX will not be be easy, Fenimore conceded. "We're both going to have to bear some pain here," he said But he predicted Microsoft will be announcing "Gold- enabled" releases late in 1998 and for its part Integrion will offer interoperability with OFX standard Quicken financial software from Intuit Inc (INTU.O) in 1998. |
