DrKW is trialling the service out of its Frankfurt office and using it for the management of the intra-day reconciliation process with some of its main nostro agents.

"Understanding our nostro positions on a real-time basis is key and we hope Cable & Wireless' new solution and centralised approach in this area will provide us with even greater efficiency," says Nigel Whitehouse, global head of operations at DrKW.

Cable & Wireless Real Time Nostro (C&W RTN) is a subscription-based information service accessible from a Web browser. It provides nostro agents and account holders with a single view of their nostro positions in each currency, across bank accounts, irrespective of time zones and systems, to help them manage their cash flows intra-day, rather than after the market has closed. The repository of information is hosted and managed centrally in secure Cable & Wireless hosting facilities and distributed over an authenticated Internet connection or, from early next year, via SwiftNet.

Bangkok Bank and RBC Global Services, part of RBC Financial Group, have announced they will provide data to C&W RTN, joining ANZ, Barclays, JPMorgan and Mizuho who agreed earlier this year to provide data and act as a channel to market for the service. Cable & Wireless is actually working with around 20 banks evaluating the service, and some of these, such as Citibank and the data providers that have already been announced, will be discussing real-time nostro issues at a special interest session on Wednesday afternoon at Sibos.

Thanit Sirichote, senior vice president of global payment services at Bangkok Bank, says his bank was interested in the service as a means of improving risk management for its clearing clients. "As the Thai baht is not yet a CLS currency, we want to provide our Thai baht clearing clients with real-time nostro account information so that they too can manage their settlement exposure pro-actively and conform to international best practices," he says.

RBC Financial Group is Canada's largest financial institution and the largest inter-bank clearer of Canadian dollars. It was the first Canadian financial institution to develop a proprietary real-time account service, and says its adoption of C&W RTN was a natural extension of this service because of the uniform quality of data and increased efficiencies that it provides to users.

Real-time cash reporting information is most valuable when participating banks have systems that can take advantage of the information. For this reason, many vendors have invested to develop real-time data capabilities in their products and plan to offer interfaces for both the Cable & Wireless initiative and the SwiftNet Real Time Nostro Account Information solution also released by Swift at Sibos. Both solutions make use of the Swiftnet XML cash reporting standards for messages, and Cable & Wireless says it intends to offer a streaming service over SwiftNet in the first quarter of next year.

Cable & Wireless has additionally announced partnerships with Accurate Software, City Networks, Pegasystems, SmartStream and SunGard, who will all soon be offering users of their solutions the ability to integrate real-time nostro account data into their reconciliation systems.

"The support of application developers is critical if the banking community is to derive maximum value from real-time information, in terms of improved liquidity management, reduced exposure to risk, increased operational efficiencies and enhanced customer service," says Alister Hoad, programme director for Cable & Wireless.