J.P. Morgans Treasury Services business has successfully completed a pilot of SWIFT Alliance Lite, SWIFTs new internet-based interface to enable SWIFT customers to make payments without a heavy technology investment.
SWIFTs treasury department piloted Alliance Lite for wire payment initiation and account reporting.
Using Alliance Lite financial institutions can send a range of SWIFT instructions and payments to their banks and receive account statements and other reports from their banks while benefiting from the security and resilience of SWIFTnet. Users can access the SWIFT network without the investment in telecoms and computer hardware and software.
Existing SWIFT users are able to communicate freely with Alliance Lite users without additional software changes or enhancements. Messages sent to the bank by both firms are indistinguishable.
When our commercial colleagues developed a low-cost product for use by smaller companies it seemed logical for us to be a pilot user as well and provide feedback, says Francis Vanbever, CFO of SWIFT. We worked closely with J.P. Morgan during the pilot and were pleased with how user-friendly the product was.
J.P. Morgan has supported many SWIFT initiatives in the past and we are delighted to report that Alliance Lite had a very smooth start, says Brian Wedge, SWIFT product manager, J.P. Morgans Treasury Services business, London. We expect many corporate and financial institution clients to evaluate the feasibility of using SWIFT for bank communications in the future and the availability of Alliance Lite will make this much easier for all concerned.
L.D.