Distributed Transformation Services
The use of ESB(Enterprise Service Bus) within organizations as a middle layer have now become common practice. In every organization you go to you will always find some kind of middle layer which to some extent performs a translation/transformation from one format into another.
While a lot of commercial products exist to cover this scenario, they typically stand within the organization and the few situations where specialized companies decide to go open to the public and offer such transformation as services do it as their business model to make money. Companies exist which offer services such as file format converters through API.
While reading a bunch of articles about Blockchain, I came across a number of concepts which gave a very futuristic view of how things should eventually be. The concepts describes 2 parties exchanging messages (negotiating) using a specific protocol to determine what the other party is expecting to receive as the message format. If they cannot negotiate a common message format, then they will scan for third parties which offer such as a service to perform translation mappings between them.
This is identical to what we , as human beings, do. You have a file in say JPG but you need it as a PDF to be consumed by another application. You go on the internet, type “convert JPG to PDF” and pick a tool which performs the job.
When you apply this to a broader level within banking payments, one can see a huge advantage is such a setup and possibly even the setup of a marketplace to serve such conversions (mind you , there are companies which do this for you already but they concentrate specifically on certain areas). Every country has its own interchange formats, some have country specific standards, some follow industry standards. The issue: these standards evolve over time and you need to keep up to date with the changes.
Have a read … very interesting concepts.
