Swift, the financial messaging provider for more than 10,000 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 212 countries and territories, announced today at Sibos that Clearstream will use Swift's Value Added Network (VAN) solution to connect to T2S. Clearstream plans to migrate fully to T2S - connecting via the Swift VAN - in wave 3 in September 2016.
According to Clearstream, it has chosen SWIFT for a number of key reasons. Mark Gem, Member of the Clearstream International Executive Board, says: "Clearstream selected SWIFT to connect to T2S because, having utilised SWIFT network services for years already, we knew this would offer us - and in turn our customers - the right level of resilience and reliability for connectivity in the future T2S world. We trust SWIFT as the proven connectivity specialist to do the part of the T2S work it is best at, namely messaging and financial telecommunication, so that we can focus on our core business engineering. SWIFT also offers us the potential to provide additional value-added services such as standards management and testing to further enhance our T2S offering."
Alain Raes, Chief Executive, EMEA and Asia Pacific, SWIFT, comments: "We are delighted that Clearstream has chosen SWIFT to connect to T2S. The confidence of such a major player in our T2S connectivity solution is a significant endorsement, and we thank Clearstream for its confidence that SWIFT's is the most reliable, cost effective and strategic solution."
The objective of T2S is to facilitate post-trading integration by offering core, neutral, harmonised and commoditised delivery-versus-payment settlement in central bank money in substantially all securities in Europe. SWIFT's VAN solution will enable T2S participants to connect to the T2S platform for the secure exchange of business information, in ISO 20022 format, with the highest resilience, at the best price and with the least upfront cost.
SWIFT has also created a full suite of services to support its customers - both those connecting directly and those that will be indirect participants - in the transition to T2S, starting from analysis, and progressing through implementation, testing and migration, all the way to live operations. These services leverage SWIFT's unparalleled track record of managing technical platform migrations and securities market infrastructure initiatives. They also draw on SWIFT's unrivalled expertise in the ISO 20022 standards underpinning T2S communications.