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Alliance Cloud messaging APIs for SIL

For 40 years, our users have been able to transact with the global community using SWIFT’s financial messaging services. However, more and more SWIFT users want to leverage the many benefits of API technology to connect to their counterparties. Yet combining API technology with SWIFT’s messaging services has not been possible – until now.

The Alliance Cloud messaging APIs for SIL enables your Back office applications to communicate with Alliance Cloud by embedding SWIFT messages inside API calls using the REST connector, which is a standard connectivity adapter available today on the SWIFT Integration Layer (SIL), a lightweight customer footprint, which offers easy integration with Alliance Cloud via standard connectivity adapters.

The REST connector is the latest addition to the SIL portfolio, and serves as bidirectional connector for Back Offices functions to exchange messages (including copy of messages, transmission reports, delivery reports, delivery notifications) with Alliance Cloud, via RESTful APIs. So now you can 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 over SIL. Upload and download endpoints are available per SWIFT service (FIN, InterAct, FileAct), while retrieving the list of available messages to be downloaded can either be done per SWIFT service or for all services.

 

Alliance Cloud SIL REST Connector

 

Important note: To benefit from this private API solution you must have an active subscription for Alliance Cloud and install SIL.

 

Types of APIs

You can use APIs to upload and download any FIN, InterAct or FileAct message or file. SIL plays a key role in carrying the RESTFul API requests from Back-office application to Alliance Cloud and in relaying the response back from Alliance Cloud to the Back Office application.

 

Upload a message or file

  • FIN: POST /alliancecloud/v1/fin/messages
  • InterAct: POST /alliancecloud/v1/interact/messages
  • FileAct: POST /alliancecloud/v1/fileact/messages

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:

 

Alliance Cloud SIL REST Connector

 

Download a message or file

Outgoing/incoming message and file, transmission/delivery report and delivery notification can be retrieved via three (3) API calls.

  • Retrieve list of items: GET /alliancecloud/v1/distribution-statuses
  • Download 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}
  • Acknowledge the download of the specific item:
    • POST alliancecloud/v1/distribution-statuses/{id}/acks
    • POST alliancecloud/v1/distribution-statuses/{id}/naks

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

 

Alliance Cloud SIL REST Connector

 

Note:

  • When the Back office rejects the download of the message via a NACK, the message will still be part of the available list of messages (but after 3 NACKs for the same message, it will be removed from the available messages list).
  • Acknowledging the download will be made by issuing a POST on the ACK link, without any HTTP body.
  • An explicit NACK for the download (e.g. error in BO storing the message...) will be made by issuing a POST on the NACK link, with this object as HTTP body.