SunGard Business Integration says that Liechtenstein-based Verwaltungs – und Privat-Bank AG (VP Bank) has bought SunGard’s MINT solution to consolidate its financial messaging.
VP Bank required a scalable and robust solution that would help reduce the overall costs of its financial messaging. The global banking industry has to migrate all of its X.25 SWIFT connections to the new SWIFTNet IP network by the end of 2004. With the SIC, euroSIC and SECOM Swiss clearing networks similarly migrating from X.25 to IP (under a project named Finance IPNet), VP Bank was looking for a solution that would both cope with these changes and allow the addition of new SWIFTNet services. The MINT solution completely replaces four separate financial messaging gateways.
“We were looking for one single solution from one vendor that would allow us to substantially reduce our overall cost of operations caused by our existing fragmented messaging environment,” says Gerhard Hring, chief group information officer of VP Bank. “It was also crucial for us to find a reliable and proven solution that was scalable and ready for the coming changes with SWIFTNet and Finance IPNet for the Swiss Clearing systems. Increasing our operational efficiency and overall STP rates were other important selection criteria. SunGard’s MINT solution met all of these issues and as such was the best fit for us to centrally process over one platform our whole SWIFT, SIC, euroSIC and SECOM traffic.”
SunGard says the MINT Multi-bank solution offers a consolidated operations solution on one platform from one proven and leading vendor, and that this will allow VP Bank to recognise a significant reduction in the cost of ownership as well as improving its overall STP rate because of better process automation. By selecting MINT, VP Bank now has a fully integrated multi-network solution for centrally processing its SWIFT, SIC, euroSIC and SECOM traffic.
“We welcome the decision by VP Bank to select MINT technology as its strategic SWIFTNet and Finance IPNet migration platform,” says Gerd Klask, managing director for Central Europe at SunGard Business Integration. “By adopting our ‘consolidated operations’ approach, VP Bank has an open and scalable solution that supports a wide range of financial messaging standards, allowing investment protection for the future.”
SunGard says the ‘single-network multi-services’ SWIFTNet revolution has led many organizations to re-evaluate their network operations architecture. Economies of scale achieved by consolidating as many financial services as possible into one network operations framework can reduce total cost of ownership and increase operational efficiency.