Claudia Cassinari, senior product manager, SwiftNet Cash Reporting at Swift, says the latest announcements brings the total number of users to over 100, with around 90 institutions providing data.

"With the Target2 deadline in 2007, banks will have to send cash management messages over XML, and cash reporting messages will be a subset of that," she says. "Banks want to become more familiar with the XML messages being released in November and the kind of data integration required ahead of the mandatory system upgrades. As a result, we expect that the number of providers and users of SwiftNet Cash Reporting will rapidly increase over the next year or so."

At Sibos a number of banks have announced plans to use the service. Deutsche Bank plans to offer its customers real-time cash reporting via SwiftNet's InterAct service from early 2006. SEB has signed up to use SwiftNet Cash Reporting as part of the launch of its Nordic Baltic Liquidity Platform, which aims to help financial institutions reduce costs by bundling Nordic and Baltic currencies together with a single service provider.

HSBC has signed an agreement with Swift to create a real-time nostro information service using SwiftNet Cash Reporting to link 42 separate HSBC Group companies. This builds on a number of SwiftSolutions it is already implementing, such as Exceptions and Investigations and the Trade Services Utility.

RZB has also signed up for the service, gearing up for the day when its cash management clients begin to demand real-time information delivery.

"Up to now our customers have been satisfied with the quality of information provided by RZB," says Guenther Gall, senior vice president and head of RZB's transaction services division. "However, we recognise that we are living in an environment with moving targets all around us und we must be prepared for the moment when the first customer wishes to be provided with real-time information."

Gall accepts that the market is still sceptical about the necessity for real-time transactional data. "To get the information real time is one side," he says. "To get value out of this speedy information and convert it into revenue is the other side of the coin."

It will take some time to change applications and attitudes, says Gall, "but speed in information and high quality in processing will be the key factor in transactional business".

Swift's Cassinari says that up until recently most of the banks using real-time cash reporting in a live environment have been integrating it into systems developed inhouse. But increasingly, banks are making use of software from vendors to achieve a faster time to market. She cites Fortis Bank and financial messaging vendor Trax as a good example of this.

In the search for areas where real-time information can provide more value, the steering group for Swift's cash reporting is looking beyond the nostro account reporting it was initially designed for and considering corporate involvement and reporting on securities accounts. "This is why the nostro terminology has been removed from the initiative's name," says Cassinari. "At the next industry forum on November 22 we hope to investigate these new areas further."

While Swift looks beyond the applicability of its real-time XML message service for nostro account reporting, Cable & Wireless is maintaining the focus of it's real-time nostro (RTN) service, with several new banks signing up at Sibos.

A number of banks are using both the Cable & Wireless service and SwiftNet, and Cassinari says there is no real conflict between the two. "Originally the two models weren't aligned, which caused some hesitation and uncertainty in the market. But we worked to make the two models interoperable and SwiftNet supports both the hub model of Cable & Wireless and a bilateral approach. Banks can use the same infrastructure and message types to distribute or use data using either or both models, depending on client demands."

One of the banks working with both Cable & Wireless and Swift is HSBC, which announced at Sibos that it has become the first financial institution to sign up as a provider of currency information into the RTN service using SwiftNet XML standards.