The IFX Standard: global Adoption Is Only a Matter of Time?

Celent: Adoption of the IFX standard has been slow, with 25% of the world's top 50 banks currently involved in IFX deployments, but IFX will boom to reach 60% by 2009.

Interactive Financial Exchange (IFX) is an XML-based standard that enables financial transactions through Web services–type interfaces. The standard provides the ability to exchange financial data regardless of technology platform. Adoption of IFX has been slow to date, but the standard is well-positioned to become widely used within the financial services industry, according to the Celent report, The report examines the potential of IFX to enhance interoperability between systems, lower development costs, increase the speed to market of new products and services, and reduce the burden of maintaining numerous systems and hardware.

Although there is a general knowledge of the benefits that the IFX standard can bring, banks have been cautiously evaluating when to adopt this technology. So despite the potential of the IFX standard, adoption to date has been slow. Only large leading institutions have taken early steps to adopt the IFX standard. The majority of banks are waiting for proof of concept and measuring return on investment before adopting this technology.

The institutions backing the development of IFX see it as creating strong competitive advantages. Ironically, these institutions are keeping their IFX strategies close to the vest for the time being, impeding development of the standard in the industry overall. The IFX Standard: global Adoption Is Only a Matter of Time?