Swift, the financial messaging provider for more than 10,000 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 212 countries and territories, today announced at Sibos that Bank of America Merrill Lynch has joined its Early Adopter Programme for the Japan Securities Depository Centre (JASDEC), the country's central securities depository.
JASDEC has been working closely with SWIFT to internationalise and standardise their messaging standards and connectivity by adopting ISO20022, as it strives to increase international competitiveness, strengthen interoperability and straight through processing, and enhance market functionality. From January 2014 to December 2018, all market participants must migrate their messaging standards from the existing message formats to ISO20022.
The Early Adopter Programme is a SWIFT initiative to help customers connect to JASDEC and to send ISO20022 messages via SWIFTNet from the start of the community testing phase in July 2013.
Taro Fukushima, Managing Director, Head of Japan Global Markets Operations, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says: "By connecting to JASDEC via the existing SWIFTNet, we can achieve cost efficiencies and it simplifies our global connectivity on a common platform, with proven resiliency and security, so that we can focus on growing our core securities business."
Martin Vizjak, Director, JASDEC Initiative, SWIFT, says: "As Asia takes centre stage in the global economy, the need to adopt international standards like ISO20022 has become an imperative because it is the common standards platform for the financial industry. Asian market infrastructures have been at the forefront of this development, with Japan being one of the first countries to start moving its central securities depository to ISO20022."
"Implementing ISO20022 over SWIFT brings cost efficiencies and time savings to the JASDEC community, as we are recognised as the global leader for ISO20022 with standards expertise, consulting and training services to support end-to-end transition," adds Martin.
Tessa Teo, Global Account Director - Asia Pacific, SWIFT, comments: "As an early adopter, Bank of America Merrill Lynch will enjoy a period of free messaging and other benefits, such as product and service discounts, facilitating their ISO20022 migration and reducing the impact of this change. For JASDEC customers using SWIFTNet, it is a great learning opportunity to gain valuable experience for other future ISO implementations."
SWIFT has been in Asia Pacific for over 30 years, starting in Hong Kong and Singapore. Three regional offices have been opened in Asia since 2005, bringing the total to eight commercial and support offices, as well as an Operational Central Control Centre and a new corporate services hub that opened in Kuala Lumpur earlier this year.