Sun Microsystems and Bank of America, a key provider of treasury services to Sun, are breaking new ground with a pilot of the ISO 20022 global financial messaging standard for end-to-end payment processing. Running on Sun’s own Solaris 10 Operating System, the pilot will help Sun achieve full end-to-end automation of payment processing operations around the world.

Sun is using its own Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) software for the transmission of payments data to Bank of America to comply with the SWIFT ISO 20022 XML industry standard. Java CAPS was recently certified with the SWIFT Gold Label, for the ninth year in a row – confirming that the Sun solution is fully compliant with the 2007 SWIFT standards.

Leveraging its existing relationship with Bank of America, Sun is using a phased approach for the pilot implementation. Sun will initially focus on sending credit transfers to the bank and receiving acknowledgements in the form of payment status reports in return. The new credit transfer process enables Sun to send any type of payment instruction, including checks, wires, and drafts, in a single message. Future developments will focus on account reporting and credit notification.

The Treasury project with Bank of America is part of a major redesign of Sun’s business-to-business IT infrastructure, which sees the organization moving to an enterprise-wide XML-based service-oriented architecture (SOA).