Sun Microsystems and Bank of America Pilot New Solaris-based Payments Processing System to Help Improve Treasury Efficiency

Boston, MA. Sibos Conference.- 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.

“In redesigning Sun Microsystems’s Treasury architecture, we are relying on industry standards such as ISO 20022 and SWIFT for Corporates,” said Brad Vollmer, Assistant Treasurer, Sun Microsystems. “Standardizing our business processes and systems interfaces using these systems and our own internal ERP platform running on Solaris, we anticipate achieving significant efficiencies.”

“Today our payments are in multiple formats and must go through many communication vehicles before they arrive at Bank of America. We saw an opportunity to use Bank of America’s ISO 20022 XML payment pilot to transform its payables systems into a single global platform,” said Sander Rijlaarsdam, Procure-to-Pay Architect, Sun Microsystems. “XML and Java CAPS enables Sun to migrate to one global payments solution - one software package, one messaging format, one interface for direct communication with Bank of America, and a common set of processing steps.”

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.

Susan Colles, Senior Vice President, Global Corporate Solutions and Support, Bank of America said, “We’re delighted to be piloting this project with Sun Microsystems, a long-time valued client. With the publication of the ISO standards, the business community now has a set of global XML messaging standards that has been accepted by the financial industry. We look forward to building out our platform so we can offer other customers the opportunity to streamline global payments processing into more efficient and cost-effective systems.”

Bank of America intends to make the credit transfer capability more broadly available to clients by the first quarter of 2008.

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).