The document discusses the challenges of mobility, location, connectivity and social aspects in finance and proposes a connected finance reference architecture. It addresses issues like virtual and mobile payments, mobile payment ecosystems and next generation financial infrastructure. The proposed architecture supports financial protocols like FIX, FpML and FIXML, bridges them to open protocols, and enables secure connectivity through cloud connectors. It provides routing, unification, event-driven messaging and hybrid deployment capabilities. The architecture aims to offer scalability, high-availability, real-time capabilities, guaranteed delivery and security for financial applications and services.