Evolving customer expectations, new technologies, and regulation are driving a major transformation in financial services. These factors are challenging financial institutions to stay relevant in an ever more dynamic landscape. More and more Swift users want to leverage the many benefits of API technology to connect to their counterparties. Not only are we responding to that growing demand, we are also accompanying you through that journey.

The Swift Messaging API enables your back-office applications to communicate with any Swift counterparty through Alliance Cloud by embedding Swift messages inside API calls, which offers easy and direct integration with Alliance Cloud using standard RESTful connectivity.

The Swift Messaging API is the new connectivity feature designed for Alliance Cloud customers that provides bidirectional flows for back offices to exchange messages (including copy of messages, transmission reports, delivery reports, delivery notifications) with Alliance Cloud, using RESTful APIs. You can now use APIs to leverage the wide range of messaging services available on Swift, including all the FIN, InterAct, and FileAct services supported by Alliance Cloud. Upload and download endpoints are available per Swift service (FIN, InterAct, and FileAct), while retrieving the list of available messages to be downloaded is available agnostically for all services.

The Swift Messaging API supports batching for both sending and receiving FIN and InterAct messages. FileAct messages are only exchanged individually, although transmission reports and delivery reports for sent FileAct messages can be received in batch.

Important note: To benefit from this Messaging API solution you must have an active subscription for Alliance Cloud

Types of APIs

You can use APIs to upload and download any FIN, InterAct, or FileAct message. The RESTFul API requests and responses are directly transferred between your back-office application and Alliance Cloud.

As mentioned above, we are actively working on including the FileAct message services into the offered functionalities.

Upload of

• a message:
  • POST /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/messages
• a batch of messages
  • POST /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/messages/batch (only for FIN and InterAct)

(xxx being the service type => fin or interact or fileact)

The Business payload of a message (e.g. the block4 of an MT message) is present in the field “payload” in base64 encoded version. An example flow of an API to upload a Fin message can be summarised as follows:

Download a message 

Incoming messages, transmission/delivery reports and delivery notifications as well as outgoing messages, sent back towards the back-office applications, can be retrieved visa three (3) API calls.

• Retrieve list of items: GET /alliancecloud/v1/distributions
• Download of
  • a specific item:
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/messages/{id}
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/transmission-reports/{id}
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/delivery-reports/{id}
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/delivery-notifications/{id}
  • a batch of items:
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/messages?distributionId
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/transmission-reports?distributionId
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/delivery-reports?distributionId
    • GET /alliancecloud/v1/xxx/delivery-notifications?distributionId
    •  All delivery notifications for SwiftNet messages (InterAct and FileAct) are distributed through the InterAct endpoints (/alliancecloud/v1/interact/delivery-notifications)
• Acknowledge the download of
  • a the specific item:
    • POST /alliancecloud/v1/distributions/{id}/acks
    • POST /alliancecloud/v1/distributions/{id}/naks
  • a batch of items:
    • PATCH /alliancecloud/v1/distributions

(xxx being the service type => fin or interact or fileact)

Similar to the upload, the download of a FileAct message follows a specific mechanism for retrieving the binary payload, described in the "Getting Started Guide"

An example flow of an API to download a FIN message can be summarised as follows:

Note:

• When the back office rejects the download of a message via a NACK, this message is removed from the available messages list.
• Acknowledging the download is done by issuing a POST on the ACK endpoint, without any HTTP body.
• An explicit NACK for the download (such as an error in BO storing the message...) is sent by issuing a POST on the NACK link. The HTTP body contains the reason for this NACK.

Supported Developer Toolkit

This API is supported by Swift SDK and Swift Microgateway.

Ordering & Provisioning

Swift messaging API is fully linked and tied with Alliance Cloud, customers do not order this API separately, customers order Alliance Cloud and can then decide to use this API to connect their back-office applications with Alliance Cloud.