Global Crossing's IP Convergence Solutions Suite allows financial services firms to achieve the flexibility and redundancy required to support mission-critical applications and transport IP data seamlessly throughout key financial centers worldwide. The solution also addresses key industry concerns over network reliability and overall IP data security, as firms put stronger focus on meeting increasingly stringent regulatory and compliance standards.

"Financial companies find that our solutions serve as a strategic tool for their business," said Global Crossing's chief marketing officer Anthony Christie. "Our offer answers the needs of the industry with a comprehensive approach to security - including physical, network, personnel, and more - that is based upon rigid requirements established by the UK and US governments, and leading application security for viruses and denial of service (DoS) attacks, delivered over a fully interoperable global IP-based network platform."

Banks and insurance firms looking to deliver more value-added services to their customers through online portals will find that Global Crossing's IP solutions enable a greater degree of front-office to back-office integration. By integrating legacy systems with native IP systems, such firms will find it possible to create global partnerships, optimize multiple business processes and offer their customers an integrated view of investments and portfolio management.

Global Crossing's MPLS-based IP VPN provides three classes of service (CoS) with differentiated quality of service (QoS), enabling financial firms to simultaneously run multiple applications, including IP turrets, instantaneous trading and multicast services with guaranteed performance. The VPN is also a clear choice for firms that need to implement or update their business continuity planning, solutions that could potentially save millions of dollars should an outage to key systems occur.

For financial services enterprises with a globally dispersed workforce, or a high number of remote workers, Global Crossing's IP videoconferencing allows firms to establish on-demand videoconference meetings any time. Video traffic is dynamically transported at high speed over a private IP network worldwide, helping firms save on travel costs.

With Global VoIP Enterprise Service, firms can save on their telephony costs, thereby lowering their network's total cost of ownership. Global Crossing is an industry innovator in VoIP solutions and currently carries more than two billion minutes a month of VoIP traffic over its global IP network.

"The financial community relies on global relationships and innovative service capabilities," Mr. Christie added. "Our history of providing high quality service to the industry and this new set of IP solutions will allow firms to foster many more relationships worldwide and discover an even greater number of efficient IP-based solutions that can help stabilize their customer base and offer a greater number of services."

In addition to the Converged IP Solutions announced today, Global Crossing has been serving the financial services industry with a set of customized applications for the investment trading community for more than eight years. Global Crossing's Hoot and Holler network carries real-time news and market commentary to trading floors and offices worldwide. The company's Trader Voice capability provides instant voice messaging for the trading community, while its Financial Extranet allows customers to connect, communicate and transact by linking global data providers and trading partners. Global Crossing supports some of industry's top firms with these services.