With more than 20 years of experience in the financial industry, I have the advantage of working in both sides of the market, as a customer who connects to SWIFT and as a SWIFT Service Bureau who provides connectivity to the SWIFTNet.
During my banking years, I remember how complicated it was to get the resources and capability to maintain a sound SWIFT environment. To provide support for day-to-day operations, check for new releases, patch installations, to manage security certificates, and to ensure a high availability environment of the services, DR tests, etc.
In addition to that complexity, nowadays the scenarios have been turning worse with respect to security caused by an increase of attacks aimed at financial and corporate entities: all these factors have turned the maintenance of the SWIFT environment into a real, time-consuming challenge.
This is a big load for those who must deal with daily operations, infrastructure and security departments of all the entities who are connected to SWIFT. These challenges result in added costs that companies need to invest in order to maintain a reliable and secure connection.
Why an Independent SWIFT Service Bureau?
Once I was talking with one of our customers, who told me about the fears that some decision makers in the company had about going to a Service Bureau. “Today I realize that was the best decision we made,” he later told me.
Based on the feedback we have from potential Clients, here are some of the reasons why they decided why not go to a Service Bureau:
- We don’t have time to start this kind of project.
- We don’t have the required resources.
- We identify a big risk moving our SWIFT infrastructure from the bank.
We understand that apart from being the most cost-efficient option, the independent SWIFT Service Bureau is more reliable and secure than having the installation in your own premises. Here’s why:
Since SWIFT created the Shared Infrastructure Program (SIP), the security, reliance and quality bar has been raised to a level so that only those Service Bureaus certified by SWIFT can provide this connectivity service. The SIP mandates include the Customer Security Program (CSP) requirements that any entity who connects to SWIFT must comply with, in addition to other high-level controls specific to Service Bureaus. Part of these requirements is to have Swift-Certified Experts working in the Service Bureau support team. For any company, it is very difficult to get this kind of SWIFT-specific trained resources. The customer must use internal resources who, instead of executing these tasks, could be working on other task or projects which brings direct added value to the company. The ideal scenario is to delegate these tasks to a company especially prepared to function as your SWIFT Service Bureau.
Why Axletree?
Axletree is a company that carries SWIFT connectivity experience since the SWIFT Service Bureau concept was created. Since then, Axletree has evolved in such a way as to provide not only connectivity but end-to-end connectivity service covering the complete lifecycle of the payment. The service includes tools that provide integration from any kind of system, translation from any kind of format, a complete view of payment status, Treasury Management, Compliance, and GPI enablement.
Our support service is known by the excellence of its service., quality and fast implementations. We invite you to read our success cases, where you will be able to find scenarios where other vendors were not able to cover the customer requirements whereas Axletree succeeded.
One of the main differences told by our customers are the different experience their Company had with their SWIFTNet connectivity since joining the Axletree SWIFT Service Bureau: this provided Peace of Mind for the Client during the planning and execution phases of the project, as well as for the ongoing “Live” support thereafter.
We have had several projects where the customer was under severe pressure to meet a time line for “going live”, cases where other vendors did not accept the project due those time restrictions and difficulty. Axletree accepted the challenge and succeeded within the given time constraints to migrate the Client to the Axletree Service Bureau.
It is also not enough to say that we follow the best practices if we don’t prove it. Axletree is audited and currently certified by the AICPA SOC2 Type 2 certification reports that we provide our Clients for their due diligence.
If you are a financial or corporate entity with items to solve about your payment services, whether related to SWIFT or otherwise: contact us, tell us about your challenges and we will be happy to help you.
We deliver performance for an on-demand connected FinTech world!
August 2, 2019
