Today, almost 500 customers - central banks, commercial banks, custodians, brokers, investment managers and corporates - in 72 countries take advantage of the highly cost-effective and very reliable, robust and secure matching functionality of Accord, across their treasury, commodities and securities businesses.

It is a crucial component of SWIFT‟s new strategy, SWIFT2015, to invest in a complete renewal of the Accord service to ensure it remains the market-leading matching solution, with a non-disruptive roll-out of powerful new technology. The change will be seamless to Accord customers, and they will benefit from a range of new capabilities that will enhance their operational efficiency.

During its 20 years of operation, Accord‟s functionality has been continually enhanced. Its scope has been extended, transforming it from an application for matching MT300s into a complete matching solution for treasury, with recently added functionality for matching
commodities and the launch of Accord for Securities. The operator interface has been consistently enriched and the platform on which Accord is based has been regularly
refreshed.

Accord can boast world-class levels of availability - uptime of more than 99.97 per cent over 20 years - and the matching results Accord produces are renowned for their absolute reliability. A demonstration of this is the decision of market infrastructures such as central
counterparties (CCPs) to use inputs from Accord to feed their own processes.

Accord‟s new technology platform, introduced in a seamless fashion for existing customers, will preserve the strengths that have defined the matching application during its first 20 years, while enabling further reductions in operating costs and offering the best possible user-friendliness to maximise operator efficiency. SWIFT will enhance the integration
capabilities of Accord, to make it even easier to embed its full functionality into leading financial software applications.

The renewal of Accord will also enable the rapid introduction of new functionality - meaning SWIFT can respond very quickly to new customer requirements, for example for matching additional asset classes.

Speaking at Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam, Dennis Sweeney, Senior Director at Accord customer NewEdge Group, said: "If you can find something better than Accord - which I would be surprised about - then I would like you to tell me what it is. We will be with Accord for some time. We have got the scalability. We don‟t have to do anything other than trade. So for us, we are in Accord." View the full interview with Mr. Sweeney on swift.com.

Gottfried Leibbrandt, Head of Marketing, SWIFT, adds: "We are proud of Accord‟s achievements during the past 20 years, and we are committed to ensure that going forward Accord has the agility it needs to respond to the rapidly evolving matching requirements of our customers in the treasury, commodities and securities markets."