Thanks to Stelink and its new HP Integrity Unix Blade infrastructure, EFG Bank, private banking subsidiary of EFG International in Switzerland, is able to process twice as many financial messages as before: more than 20,000 per day for its 17 branches around the world.
In recent years, EFG International has emerged as a leading financial group in Switzerland. The consolidation of its infrastructure had become essential to maintaining its competitiveness and its capacity for growth. Compatibility and integration with the application of the bank, Temenos Globus, running on Unix Integrity, has also prompted this migration. With the Alpha platform becoming obsolete, EFG Bank chose to consolidate Stelink on a scalable architecture, flexible and highly available, based on HP Integrity blade servers.
Reducing operational risks
The Stelink application is used as a HUB for swift messages that are exchanged with the different corresponding external and internal branches and entities of the bank (17). Stelink also gives access to the Swiss market clearing local infrastructure for payments and securities (SIX).
The system is used to secure the process of payment and securities delivery/settlement transactions with counterparties and custodians. It is also used for compliance checks to filter financial messages against official blacklists such as the OFAC (U.S. Office for Foreign Asset Control), the BOE (Bank of England) and the EU (European Union) concerning the fight against money laundering. In addition, the Stematch software reconciles nostro accounts and securities positions, as well as currency exchange and money market.
After conducting a rigorous evaluation, EFG Bank has selected HP Integrity Blade Unix as an ideal platform for consolidation. It offers a virtualization of the infrastructure for better performance on a mission critical system that can provide speed, scalability and higher reliability, as well as greater ease of management, energy saving and lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). The applications of EFG Bank, which incorporate the latest technologies like clustering and replication, are divided into three data centers, ensuring high availability functions and DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan). "Stelink is the only SWIFT interface available on Unix HP technology," explains Etienne Savatier, Marketing Director at Sterci, "the use on HP Integrity Blade allowed for an optimum solution and on a high performance foundation."