The bank considered a number of Bureaux but it was clear from the start that SMA offered a number of advantages. They have an established reputation as the Bureau of choice for outsourced SWIFT connectivity and it is backed up a highly experienced team of accredited consultants.

A key decision was taken to join SWIFT to enable the bank to send and receive payment messages over the secure network. Michael Tidmarsh, Head of IT at ICBUK said, "As a start-up bank we needed the ability to quickly get all of our systems operational as efficiently as possible. By outsourcing our SWIFT connectivity to a specialist partner such as SMA we were able to go live with minimal effort. We also gained the priceless ability to keep our limited IT resources focused on other projects during the build up to the bank's launch, safe in knowledge that SMA was looking after our SWIFT connectivity."

Tidmarsh had prior experience of working with SWIFT and knew that as new services were released over time and the infrastructure upgraded, the complexity of connecting to SWIFT and keeping the implementation up to date had grown more time and resource intensive. The Bureau option was therefore attractive to the bank.

The bank appreciates that a Bureau Service removes the need for daily administration time to be spent on maintenance and sees a number of clear benefits to using the SMA Bureau Service. ICBUK can connect to SWIFT without worrying about upgrades, fixes and repairs. Additionally, the Bureau shields the bank and its users from any complexity associated with SWIFT connectivity.

Tidmarsh has high praise for SMA, "The Bureau gives us all of the benefits of SWIFT today and we will have access to all of the new services as they are released tomorrow. The service that we have received has been excellent and the SMA consultants ensured the bank was able to go live on schedule. I sleep more easily at night knowing that our critical infrastructure is being looking looked after by the experts at SMA."

Simon Murby, Managing Director of SMA Financial said, "A new bank faces the complex task of getting its back office infrastructure set up to support its operational requirements. I am very pleased that SMA has been able to simplify part of this process for ICBUK and I look forward to supporting their requirements for many years to come."