Some in the international community are showing the same interest in "webifying" their Automated Clearing House transactions as the U.S. is.
At Payments 2002, Deutsche Bank's vice president Detlef Henkel described the Germany-based bank's struggle to move from legacy systems to Web-based ACH-payment software, with formats coded in XML and provided by IntraNet.
The fact that there's not yet a banking standard using XML has been a drawback, said Henkel, but added that the bigger problem has been getting the separate Deutsche Bank operations in France and other locations in Europe to get solidly behind the project.
Each branch has certain policies and procedures, and language differences have created conflicts. Moreover, in spite of the Euro as a single currency for a united Europe, Europe's national ACH systems remain extremely fragmented. But Henkel remains optimistic. "If we can change our access strategy so the Web layer handles all the custom feeds, we can change from batch to real-time processing with that, which would be a big advantage to us," he says. "We should save in processing and support maintenance."
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