FOR FINANCIAL MARKET INFRASTRUCTURES
Unifits Virtual Participant
The Missing Piece for Your Industry Testing – Beyond Validation, Into Real Interaction
What is the Unifits Virtual Participant ?
The Unifits Virtual Participant is an intelligent, always-available testing counterpart that enables banks and financial institutions to perform full end-to-end transaction flow testing without relying on real counterparties.
It ensures seamless industry-wide interoperability by simulating real-world message exchanges.
Key Benefits
Accelerate Industry Testing – No Waiting for Counterparties
Participants can fully test their interactions with the infrastructure at any time, without waiting for real counterparties. The Unifits Virtual Participant acts as a smart testing counterpart, responding dynamically to test scenarios and covers both inbound and outbound transactions.
Ensure Seamless Transaction Flows – Beyond Validation, Into Real Interaction
Unlike basic message validation, the Unifits Virtual Participant enables structured, end-to-end transaction flow testing. It ensures realistic system behavior, seamless interoperability, and full-scale industry testing—without reliance on real counterparties.
Improve Quality & Reduce Manual Effort – Full Oversight, Less Operational Overhead
Clearing and settlement providers gain full transparency into participant testing progress, ensuring institutions follow a structured, repeatable process. This reduces manual intervention, simplifies compliance monitoring, and minimizes onboarding support efforts.
Strengthen Reliability – Scalable Testing for Every Scenario
The Unifits Virtual Participant goes beyond standard testing by supporting high-volume transaction flows, edge cases, and failure handling. This helps both participants and central infrastructures build industry-wide resilience and prepare for live operations with confidence.
“Unifits’ onboarding solution and simulation capabilities were crucial in validating our participants’ builds. By enabling self-testing and certification, we identified and resolved issues early, ensuring a smooth transition to go live with minimal effort on our part.”
Why It Matters
Industry-wide testing comes with complex challenges, and traditional approaches fall short. Without a centralized, automated solution, financial market infrastructures and participants face:
- High operational overhead – Manual coordination and counterparty dependencies slow down onboarding and increase resource demands.
- Increased risk exposure – Unstructured testing processes heighten the risk of transaction failures, compliance breaches, and regulatory penalties.
- Limited scalability – Growing transaction volumes and evolving regulatory requirements make fragmented testing solutions unsustainable.
How the Unifits Virtual Participant Supports Industry Testing
The Unifits Virtual Participant (VIP) acts as a fully integrated counterpart within the clearing and settlement infrastructure. It enables real transaction flow testing without dependency on real participants. By simulating participant interactions, VIP ensures seamless testing and interoperability, allowing financial institutions to accelerate testing at their own pace while minimizing manual effort and operational risk.
Virtual Participant
Use case examples
The examples below both show the same payment flows, first from a Debtor Agent perspective and second from a Creditor Agent perspective. The “missing” Agend / Participant in each case is simulated by the Unifits VIP.
Use case I
Unifits Virtual Participant simulates behaviour of the Credit Agent
- The real participant (Debtor Agent, under test) sends an initial payment message pacs.008, the virtual participant responds with a pacs.002
- The real participant initiates a return request and the virtual participant responds with a corresponding camt.029
- The virtual participant then creates and sends the payment return pacs.004 and the real participant is required to answer with a final pacs.002
Use case II
Unifits Virtual Participant simulates behavior of the Debtor Agent
The real participant (Creditor Agent, under test) initiates the desired test process either via a parametrized trigger message or via an easy-to-use user interface.
- The virtual participant creates and sends the payment message pacs.008, real participant (Creditor Agent, under test) is required to respond with a pacs.002
- After a configurable preset time, the virtual participant creates and sends the return request message (camt.056), the real participant is required to respond with a camt.029
- Then the real participant needs to create and send the payment return pacs.004. Then the virtual participant will respond with a corresponding pacs.002
Speak with our Experts
What our clients say about us
Unifits increased our client onboarding efficiency by factors and significantly improved our overall end-to-end processing quality
Unifits has been a game-changer in increasing the accuracy and quality of our testing.
With Unifits we have been able to significantly reduce effort and duration for our payment testing.
Unifits not only met but surpassed our high expectations – the Test Engine proved to be a key success factor in our ISO 20022 project.
We’ve been thoroughly impressed – both by the Unifits solution and by their deep subject-matter expertise.
Unifits’ self-certification capabilities helped us a lot to stay ahead of the curve by identifying issues before going live.
Frequently asked questions
About the product
The Unifits Virtual Participant is an intelligent, always-available testing counterpart that enables banks and financial institutions to perform full end-to-end transaction flow testing without relying on real counterparties. It ensures seamless industry-wide interoperability by simulating real-world message exchanges.
While the Unifits Onboarding Portal focuses on validation and test data creation, the Unifits Virtual Participant takes the next step – enabling full transaction flow testing, independent execution, and interoperability verification. Together, they provide 100% coverage of participant testing needs.
Yes, the Unifits Virtual Participant can be used as a standalone solution for structured, automated, end-to-end testing. However, when combined with the Unifits Onboarding Portal, it provides a seamless transition from validation to full interoperability testing.
Testing & Quality Assurance
The Unifits Virtual Participant supports any ISO 20022-based scheme, including bulk payments, instant payments, and high-value transactions. It initiates and validates full message flows across all required interactions. before moving to full industry testing.
Yes. The Unifits Virtual Participant enables structured, repeatable test executions, making it easy to verify compliance across new scheme updates and infrastructure changes.
Yes. The Unifits Virtual Participant is designed to replicate real-world transaction flows, automatically responding to test scenarios, including expected confirmations, rejections, and exception handling.
Participants can trigger predefined test scenarios using Message-Based Triggers and/or User Interface-Based Triggers (e.g. select test cases via a web interface to initiate inbound testing).
Integration & Deployment
The Unifits Virtual Participant is technically integrated with the clearing infrastructure, ensuring seamless testing within the central FMI environment. There are multiple deployment options:
- Installed as part of the clearing infrastructure (Recommended) – The Unifits Virtual Participant is set up within the clearing operator’s secure environment, behind firewalls, and connected via messaging services like ActiveMQ, IBM MQ, Kafka, or the like. This approach ensures data security and minimal additional effort for participants.
- Installed separately in a secure cloud environment – In this case, the Unifits Virtual Participants connects like a real participant, requiring additional setup effort but providing flexibility for specific infrastructure configurations.
- Connected via the SWIFT Network (For FMIs using Y-Copy or direct SWIFT transactions) – Unifits has initiated the onboarding process as a SWIFT user, allowing the Unifits Virtual Participant to be accessible via the SWIFT network for certain FMI configurations.
Participants access the Unifits Virtual Participant through existing clearing test infrastructure connections, eliminating the need for separate installations. They can:
- Trigger test scenarios via specific message values (e.g., within a pacs.008).
- Use a dedicated trigger queue for structured test execution.
- Access a restricted user interface to initiate and monitor test cases without needing outbound transaction capabilities.
Regulatory & Compliance
The Unifits Virtual Participant is continuously updated to align with current industry regulations and FMI-specific testing requirements, ensuring participants always test against the latest standards.
Yes. The Unifits Virtual Participant can be tailored to match the specific rules and workflows of different FMIs, ensuring seamless alignment with each market’s unique testing and regulatory requirements.
Connect with our Experts today
We want to support and advise ideally customized to your needs.
To get in touch just complete our contact form and schedule a 30-minute call to discuss your needs and requirements, so we can set up a customized demo for you and your team.
Bank onboarding portal for fmi
A self-service testing portal that enables banks to validate messages, generate test data, and ensure scheme compliance before progressing to full industry testing.
Test Engine for FMI
An automated end-to-end testing solution that lets central infrastructures verify transaction flows before participants connect, eliminating manual effort and ensuring full validation of all scenarios.
