SIA-SSB’s multi-service broadband network, currently connecting all Italian banks, is now ready to support the entire European banking system in its evolution towards SEPA.
As of 26 October, 2007, the European financial sector can benefit, in addition to connectivity services, from the messaging services used within payment systems, capable of supporting the greater transaction volumes generated by the start-up of SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area, planned for January 2008.
SEPA will require financial institutions to equip themselves with pan- European communication infrastructures that are compatible with the new instruments and capable of speeding up and simplify the management processes of payments.
In line with its expansion strategy in Europe, SIAnet enables connection to EBA Clearing’s Step2 technology platform, the first Pan-European Automated Clearing House. At present, there are over 100 banks participating directly in STEP2 that can choose to use SIAnet to manage SEPA transactions.
SIA-SSB’s network infrastructure processes a daily average of 3.6 million transactions at European level, compared to approximately 10 million operations transported every day on the entire SWIFTNet network globally. In the first nine months of 2007, through the 590 active network nodes, 6.4 terabytes (six thousand four hundred billion bytes) of application data were transported, with an infrastructure availability equal to 99.99% and a total available band of 12 gigabit/sec.
“After 2010, when SEPA will finally have become a reality, the true competition will be in the value added services that each provider will be able to design and create,” says Renzo Vanetti, CEO, SIA-SSB.