Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank and Standard Bank, South Africa, have all agreed to become providers to the Cable & Wireless Real-Time Nostro (RTN) service.
The new additions bring the total number of banks actively involved with the service to 35, including live users, those in the middle of implementation and those in the planning stage.
Cable & Wireless says the formation of the RTN User Group earlier this year has provided increased momentum to the initiative. Based on user group discussions, Cable & Wireless has developed a macros-based, four-phase methodology that banks can use to quantify the benefits and cost savings that can be achieved by implementing the service.
Richard Pattinson, senior director, Group Treasury, Barclays and chairman of the RTN User Group says: "It is no longer enough to simply identify the various areas within a bank where value can be derived from RTN and real-time information. The methodology developed through the user group will enable an institution to input its own figures and quantify the impact of real-time information."
The Cable & Wireless RTN service, developed for Cable & Wireless by Gresham Computing, was heavily promoted at Sibos 2003 in Singapore where Swift also announced the pilot participants of its Real Time Nostro Account Information service.
Swift's solution operates on a real-time, bi-lateral basis, making use of existing SwiftNet connections within banks. There are now 20 nostro agents and account owners using the SwiftNet Cash Reporting real-time nostro account information service.
Cable & Wireless RTN was established as a hosted hub service, accessed from a Web browser and designed to promote the sharing of multi-bank, multi-currency nostro account data in real time. But the company is working with some of its vendor partners to deliver a direct feed to applications rather than delivering to a browser using the internet protocol (IP).
This year, as well as adding more data providers, Cable & Wireless went live with its own unique Swift operating code for the RTN service, and saw its first subscriber in Royal Bank of Scotland. It now has seven subscribers regularly using the service, with more active members of the user group to go live before the end of the year. Members of the user group include banks such as Citibank, Bank of America, CSFB, JPMorgan Chase, Mizuho Corporate Bank and Lehman Brothers.