According to Citi, it has chosen SWIFT for a number of key reasons. First, Citi is confident it can depend on SWIFT - a long-standing provider of critical infrastructure to the financial industry - to provide highly reliable and robust connectivity to T2S.

Second, in line with its long-term commitment to reducing its customers' operating costs, SWIFT is offering highly competitive pricing for T2S connectivity.

Third, the choice of SWIFT enables Citi to leverage its existing infrastructure for T2S - not only from an IT and operational perspective, but also in terms of the staff, expertise and processes required to successfully manage interactions with a business-critical infrastructure such as T2S.

Lee Waite, Global Head, Direct Custody and Clearing, Citi Transaction Services, says: "We are confident that SWIFT is the right T2S connectivity solution for Citi, bringing unmatched benefits in terms of resilience, price and infrastructure reuse, and we look forward to working closely with SWIFT to implement its solution to meet our specific needs. Being able to rely on SWIFT for connectivity and to make our choice of VAN provider early on means that we can now focus on delivering the best possible service to our customers to enable them to capitalise on the opportunities T2S brings."

Alain Raes, Chief Executive, EMEA, SWIFT, comments: "We are delighted that Citi has decided to leverage SWIFT to connect to T2S, and we thank Citi for its confidence that SWIFT's is the most reliable, cost effective and strategic solution for T2S connectivity. In the certainty that its T2S infrastructure can be relied upon, Citi can now focus on building the best model for customer delivery in a T2S world, and we look forward to providing other T2S participants with that same peace of mind."

The objective of T2S is to facilitate post-trading integration by offering core, neutral, harmonised and commoditised delivery-versus-payment settlement in central bank money in substantially all securities in Europe. SWIFT's VAN solution will enable T2S participants to connect to the T2S platform for the secure exchange of business information, in ISO 20022 format, with the highest resilience, at the best price and with the least upfront cost.

SWIFT has also created a full suite of services to support its customers in the transition to T2S, starting from analysis, and progressing through implementation, testing and migration, all the way to live operations. These services leverage SWIFT's unparalleled track record of managing technical platform migrations and securities market infrastructure initiatives. They also draw on SWIFT's unrivalled expertise in the ISO 20022 standards underpinning T2S communications.