Introduction

aplonHUB™ is a fast and simple way for banks to add financial messages routing functionality to existing legacy systems. Its light footprint and extensibility make it an ideal hub for banks of any size to manage and route messages such as SWIFT, ISO20022, SEPA, TARGET2, or local.

It can function as a standalone solution or be fully integrated with the existing core systems. The interfaces provided can be used directly by core systems to manage and route Credit transfers, Instant credit transfers, and Direct Debits, with minimal impact on the back-office system since you will not need to implement complex logic directly in the legacy system. Its routing and scheduling features will simplify your operations and add the necessary control to your payments process.

Open

aplonHUB transacts with the core banking or legacy payment systems in a number of methods to handle all the advanced routing and message transformation needs.

• It performs all the needed transformation and validation of your SWIFT, ISO20022, SEPA, TARGET2, or local messages before and after the connection with the Swift Alliance or Service bureau.

• It integrates seamlessly with external AML systems to guarantee compliance.

aplonHUB™ Features

Functional

• Supports incoming and outgoing SWIFT MT, ISO20022, TARGET2, SEPA, CBPR+, MEPS, P27

• Handles Credit transfers, Direct Debits, Instant Payments, MT to ISO20022 translations

• Checks and validates all messages and generates alerts where appropriate

• Alerts are highlighted in separate views where an operator can review

• Supports rich search capabilities on archived messages based on dates, status, or message contents.

• Messages can also be exported on well-defined and user-friendly PDFs.

• It correlates related messages (e.g., Replies, Returns) and displays them side-by-side for easy reconciliation.

• Incoming MT300 and MT320 are compared with equivalent outgoing messages. The differences between the two will be highlighted.

• Ability to automatically generate replies/requests for cancelation/returns/Rejects for SWIFT MT, SEPA, or ISO20022 messages

• Integrates with SWIFT ACKs/NACKs

• Connects with external AML systems and bypasses messages according to rules

Security & Auditing

• Role-based access control (maker, authorizer, viewer, administrator, AML officer, etc.)

• Audit log availability with an extensive search on date, object, action, or user.

• Local Authentication (LAU) is implemented as recommended by SWIFT to provide integrity and authentication and protect files in transit between the application and the AutoClient.

Non-functional

• Modern and user-friendly UX/UI

• Secured by design (three-tier)

• API architecture by design

• High availability by design

Components & subsystems

The basic ingredients of aplonHUB are the SWIFT MT, ISO20022, CBPR+, TARGET2, SEPA, etc., libraries of PaymentComponents. These libraries are updated annually as the new rules and validations are published by the controlling authorities every year. At these times, a newer release of aplonHUB is published and distributed.

aplonHUB depending on the functionalities supported includes the relevant subsystems and components. See below the list of the subsystems available.

Available Schemes

• SEPA Credit Transfers

• SEPA Direct Debits

• SEPA Instant Payments

• SWIFT MT

• CBPR+

• TARGET2

• P27

• MEPS+

• FedNow

Available Translations

• SWIFT MT <> CBPR+

• SWIFT MT <> Target2

Technical specifications

• aplonHUB™ is a Java-based web application that can be deployed using any J2EE-compliant application server or servlet container.

• It supports all leading RDBMSs, including MySQL, DB2, and SQL Server (preferred).

• Requires Java 8 and above.

• Clients can access the application from any web browser

Sample screens

Below there are a number of sample screens to provide you with a taste of aplonHUB

Incoming/Outgoing menus.

SEPA

Permissions: Only users with Viewer, Maker, Authorizer role has access to this view.

Open

From this view, users are able to see all outgoing/incoming files that are sent/received through aplonHUB with their status and some basic details of each transaction, like ids and amount. Once the user clicks on a transaction, then the following view will appear with the transaction details.

If the user has the Maker role, then is able to make an action on the specific transaction. For example if the transaction is an outgoing payment, then the user is able to create an outgoing recall request for this transaction. Different actions are allowed per direction and message type, for example you can recall an outgoing payment, but you can return an incoming payment.

The user in this tab has access to the list of incoming SEPA messages, the file log, and alerts. Using criteria such as date, tags, and other searching messages is made simple. Files are expandable to display the messages they contain and their details (the same applies to outgoing too).

SWIFT MT

Expanded SWIFT MT messages with user-friendly tag names. An audit trail of all actions performed by users on the message is always available.

If the message has a reply message, then this will be displayed side by side.

Search

At the search messages tab, the user can search messages using the following criteria:

• Date

• Transaction status (received, settled, etc.)

• Debtor IBAN

• Creditor IBAN

Alerts

Alerted messages are displayed in a separate view for better handling. The user can export the alerts in PDF or excel format.

Pending

The Pending menu organizes the payments into two categories. In the Outgoing screen are payments that are ready to be sent, and Authorisation contains payments that a user must manually check and approve before they are sent.

The outgoing tab allows the user to export the file in pdf or Excel format. 

An authorizer can also PAUSE a ready-to-go transaction for later. The user will see the paused transactions by selecting the Paused option in the dropdown above the list. Those transactions will be ignored by all schedulers until an authorizer chooses to RESUME this transaction (see the bellow screenshot)

Configuration

The configuration menu provides options for the setup of system settings (basic and custom that increase the user experience), AML statuses, scheduled tasks, notifications, and rules regarding actions depending on custom conditions and holidays that are configurable by the administrator.

Audit Trail

User roles with access to the audit trail screen have the ability to search using criteria. The actor, the time, and the context are recorded for every action.