BT today announced that its Managed Secure Messaging service is now available to financial institutions globally. The service allows the financial community to exchange messages securely, reliably and in a non-repudiable manner over BT private networks and the Internet for all of their business activities.
The service is designed to meet the security requirements of banks, clearing houses and securities depositories as well as corporate treasurers.
BT Managed Secure Messaging can help cut costs by increasing the automation of message processing, reducing messaging failures and the manual administrative expense of correcting them. By ensuring that a message is secure, tamper-free and delivered in a non-repudiable manner, users can have confidence that messages sent and received remain unchanged and confidential.
BT's Managed Secure Messaging service is unlike many messaging services. It records that each message has been sent and received, and informs both parties that it has been delivered correctly. BT-supplied hardware or software gateways at both sending and receiving ends ensure that messages are encrypted, kept secure and intrusion-free.
For example, banks use secure messaging to exchange payment messages with their corporate customers, and for securities settlement messages with investment managers. Corporate treasurers use secure messaging to interface their own financial systems directly with those of their banks, so that they can better manage liquidity. Central Counterparties (CCPs) and Central Securities Depositories (CSDs) use secure messaging to exchange messages with their member-firms. BT's new Managed Secure Messaging Service is aimed at helping these types of organizations to increase their operational efficiency more cost-effectively.
José Antonio Martinez, managing director, Radianz & Payments, BT, said: "The need for secure, tamper-proof and non-repudiable messaging between parties in financial transactions continues to grow. BT's Managed Secure Messaging service enables organizations to reduce their failure rates, reduce the costs of correcting those failures, and increase service levels to their customers. It is a single messaging tool that allows customers to communicate with everyone across their bus their business community. We strongly believe that this new service adds great value to our BT Radianz Community."
BT has provided customized managed secure messaging services for individual organizations in the financial sector since 1996. Each day these services deliver messages, effectively transferring hundreds of billions of pounds, securely, reliably and in a non-repudiable manner with no messages lost.
Separately, BT and Codel today announce the global availability of the Codel Digital Notary service via the BT Radianz Managed Infrastructure. This new service, allows financial institutions to protect and prove the integrity of electronic data such as messages, files and documents.
The service enables users, such as banks and market data vendors, to validate the integrity of digital data and messages end-to-end across the complete processing cycle. This means that no matter how an organisation receives data, from secondary sources, data vendors or service providers, it can be certain that what it receives is identical to the information that was created by the originator.
José Antonio Martinez, managing director of Radianz and Payments, BT said: "Data integrity, security and trust are major issues for financial institutions globally. Hackers aren't just trying to access financial institutions' data, they are trying to change it into new data which they might use to damage the targeted firm or seek financial gain. By combining the security and reliability of BT's managed network services, where we support the world's largest secure networked financial community, with Codel's Digital Notary service we can ensure 100 per cent data integrity across the whole financial supply chain."
One example of the benefit of the Codel Digital Notary service is for validating corporate actions notifications. For example, in the USA alone there are approximately 350,000 corporate actions notifications sent out each year by publicly-traded companies and other issuers and offers for announced events on equities and bonds. Investment firms and investors receiving this information depend on it being accurate and correct, particularly when their systems are designed to process this information automatically. The Codel Digital Notary service allows them to validate the integrity, source and version of this information so that they can process it with trust.
In effect, using this service is the equivalent of a recipient being physically passed the information by the data originator. But unlike a paper document, digital data marked by the Codel Digital Notary service can be verified online and at any point in the future by the sender and recipient. This can be done no matter how many times the document has previously been exchanged.
James Zorab, CEO of Codel said: "Until now, the only data integrity services that might be an alternative to Codel have been proprietary solutions used by data providers to transmit their own information. This is the first time that an open solution has been available that can be used by all industry participants - both providers and users of data. The security, reliability, scale and 100 per cent SLA of the BT Radianz Managed Infrastructure makes it the perfect method for accessing the Codel service. With BT we can assure data integrity, meaning it can be trusted and processed automatically, increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs."