In SmartVista terms, these are the financial institutions for which your SmartVista system holds information, such as General Ledger (GL) accounts, and with which it directly exchanges information, such as financial and non-financial messages. The Financial Institutions that will have to be set up in your system will include:

A Financial Institution has to be set up as one of the following Institution Types:

This allows splitting the Issuer and Acquirer functions within the same Financial Institution should this be required. Payments Organisations are set up according to the type of business you are engaged in with them: if you operate as an Issuer, they should be set to Acquirer, etc.

Your clearing banks and merchants are NOT configured as SmartVista Financial Institutions. Clearing/correspondent banks are dealt with via the core banking system and its payment facilities, while merchants are set up in SmartVista as separate entities with their own hierarchies (see Customers section below).

SmartVista allows up to two levels of Financial Institution hierarchy, so that transaction flows may be configured and reports may be provided across your branch/agent network. The higher level is called Principal Institution, and the lower level, Agent Institution.

It is important that every record in SmartVista database is marked with the identifier of the Financial Institution that it pertains to. This allows setting various institution level parameters, such as GL Accounts, financial processing rules, I/O formats, etc., so that they can be applied appropriately to all data items that belong to each particular institution, and also to control user access to data belonging to different Financial Institutions.