In selecting Mercator's integration technology KAS has set a deadline of June 2001 for its ISO 15022 project to be live - well in advance of the November deadline for the first phase of the move to the new format. The old Swift messaging standards will be completely withdrawn in November 2002.

Mercator technology provides connectivity between KAS' internal systems and the Swift interbank network, translating the existing internal data into the ISO 15022 messaging format so as to be compatible with the new standard. The vendor believes it may be in the running for further data reformatting projects at KAS if the current conversion proves a success.

Arie Zwerus, senior manager of system management operations at KAS comments: "In order to be competitive, banks have to be able to react to continuous change. We have set this ambitious conversion programme in place so that we are able to `hit the ground running' with the new Swift ISO15022 standards and can gain immediate benefits in terms of increased efficiency on straight through processed transactions."

Seperately, Mercator has announced a contract to supply the London branch of German bank Helaba with online interfaces between trading and settlement systems and a new trade reporting package connecting the London office with company headquarters in Frankfurt. The implementation - which will link the five trading and settlement systems currently used by the bank - is expected to reduce labour-intensive manual processes in the back office.

The contract also calls for the replacement of Helaba's current middleware reporting package - an overnight system that extracts and manipulates data from all processing systems and reformats and sends to the other reporting, risk management and credit systems in Frankfurt.