Approaching Finance with STP

In the world of high finance, the battle cry these days is "Straight Through Processing" (STP). STP is not so much about reautomating manual clearing of trades as it is the initial automation of this process. Today it takes days to clear trades, and there is a mandate to reduce this process to hours, even minutes.

Integration is the key here as it is within all of the verticals we are going to talk about connecting existing systems to these STP systems, which will allow financial institutions to communicate with other financial institutions in real time, exchanging trade clearing data.

There are many standards around STP today, the largest being GSTP and Omgeo, with a common characteristic of providing a central server to clear trades (TFM for GSTPA and CTM for Omgeo) a server accessible over the Internet. Let's take a quick look at each, and then the concept behind SWIFT.