Table of Contents - APTAStandards.com

opted to contract these services out in the UK and offered the Request For Proposals
for
these activities to be made available to APTA without charge if needed. ITSO
representatives from UK offered two alternative scenarios for adoption of the
specification.
• APTA is allowed to use and modify the current ITSO specification in any way
they desire to come up with their own specification based on ITSO. No licensing
or memberships fees are required. Only the specification documents on the
Internet will be available in this option, therefore APTA will have to 'reverse
engineer' the SIM card Secure Application Module and the security key
management service, if needed
• A subset of ITSO can be formed in the US, which APTA can manage. There
is no
cost involved in this option. A USA implementation of ITSO under the APTA
name would constitute a separate security domain and therefore all the keys
would be different. APTA can therefore set its own rules. The ITSO rules will be
made available to APTA to implement at will. APTA does not need to use the
ITSO official name or logo.
Setting up an APTA equivalent to ITSO can be done as soon as their membership
groups are defined and the membership is elected. This process can take approximately
three months. Putting in place the (few) full-time people, the contracts and the
processes raises the time estimate to at least six months. The current suppliers to ITSO
(ecebs for the ISAMs, Integri for Certifcation and Royal Bank of Scotland for Security
Key Management) would all be willing to supply the sub-contract services at a fee, if
necessary.
4.3
Open Financial Exchange (OFX)
4.3.1 Description of the Specification
Open Financial Exchange is a specification for the electronic exchange of financial
data
between financial institutions, businesses and consumers via the Internet. Created by
CheckFree,
Intuit and Microsoft in early 1997, Open Financial Exchange supports a
wide range of financial
activities, including consumer and small business banking,
consumer and small business bill payment, bill presentment and investments tracking
(including stocks,
bonds, mutual funds, and 401(k) account details). Since the 2000
release of the Version
2.0, OFX has become XML 1.0 compliant and has added 1098,
1099 and W2 tax form
download capabilities. Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a
broad-based
framework
for exchanging financial data and instructions between
customers and their financial institutions. It is based on open standards for data
formatting (such as XML), connectivity (TCP/IP), and security (SSL). It defines the
request and response messages used by each financial service as well as the common
framework and infrastructure to support the communication of those messages.
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