Logica, a leading IT and business services company, today announced the results of a high-performance benchmark test carried out on Fastwire Open, Logica's messaging hub, powered by IBM processors.
The hub can now process over five million SWIFT Fin messages per day. The test was carried out in conjunction with a tier one banking client, which is one of world's largest users of SWIFT - demonstrating the hub's ability to support global banks.
FASTWIRE Open can scale to support the future growth of user banks, enabling them to not only reduce operational and network costs but also to take advantage of high throughput and adaptability to meet their demanding and growing requirements.
"Banks need to gain greater efficiencies if they are to preserve profit margins, given escalating payments volumes and sustained revenue pressure," said Andy Schmidt, research director at TowerGroup. "Centralised messaging hubs that are scalable and integrated give banks the flexibility and control that their payments businesses require. This allows banks to achieve savings through reduced messaging costs - savings that can be passed on to clients."
Tim Brew, director of global financial products at Logica, commented: "Payments volumes are increasing exponentially as global banks continue to grow, either organically or through M&A activity. Our high performing financial messaging hub enables banks to reduce costs by consolidating their multiple systems onto regional or global hubs. The client that participated in this test has proven that its future FASTWIRE Open-based messaging platform will support significant growth in its messaging traffic. The solution can clearly support our clients' business expansion, but it also enables banks to reduce the overall cost per message and handle the ever increasing occurrence of unexpected volume peaks in messages."
The benchmark test was undertaken by Logica at IBM's performance testing facility in Montpellier, France, during June 2009. FASTWIRE Open, Logica's messaging hub, achieved a throughput of up to 200 messages per second, while actively using only 16 processors, exceeding the target of 150 messages per second.
For the test, the system processed SWIFT format messages while concurrently managing day-to-day activities such as archiving and database replication. The platform used an Oracle 10g database, operating with Oracle RAC and Dataguard, and was based on IBM 64-Core Power6 5GHz Based Power 595.