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Swift is taking advantage of this year's SIA Conference as the perfect opportunity to tout SwiftNet's latest features to the U.S. financial services industry.

Swift is taking advantage of this year's Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference and Exhibit as the perfect opportunity to tout SwiftNet's latest features to the U.S. financial services industry.

By the end of last year, Swift (booth 2111) completed migration of its traffic to a new Internet Protocol (IP)-based messaging platform -- SwiftNet. The organization then turned its focus to "identifying opportunities for using SwiftNet to generate substantial cost savings," according to Bob Davies, Swift regional director, North America. One such opportunity presented itself when the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) committee released version 4.4, which included new fixed income trading functionality.

"We have a pilot going on in the United States for firms to use SwiftNet FIX for fixed income trading and [the associated] allocation process," Davies says. "We have worked with the BMA [Bond Market Association] on that as well, and the results will be featured at the SIA show," he explains.

The growing use of SwiftNet -- the organization is now active in 202 countries -- is providing offshore access to U.S. markets, Davies relates. "If you have a buy-side firm in Europe that wants to buy U.S. securities, they can use SwiftNet FIX - now for fixed income as well as equities," he notes.

In addition to making room for fixed income, Swift is working to help the industry solve its corporate actions problems. The organization says it has seen 23 percent growth in corporate actions messages flowing over its network this year and a 14 percent increase in general securities traffic.

Davies says Swift has formulated a set of corporate actions messages into what it calls Swift Solutions. The organization, he says, provides firms with documentation on how to use the messages for collecting corporate actions announcement information. When it comes to voluntary corporate actions, the messages can be used, Davies says, as a means to get back to the holder of a security and say, "Here are the options on the voluntary corporate action. How do you want to make your elections?"

While enhancing its network, Swift has worked simultaneously to make accessing SwiftNet easier and less expensive. It has done so by arranging with SunGard and ADP - vendors that provide their clients access to SIAC's SFTI network - also to provide their clients access to SwiftNet on a service bureau basis. SFTI provides firms with connectivity to the New York Stock Exchange, Amex, DTCC and the National Market Systems through an infrastructure that is engineered to withstand industrywide disasters. Firms now will "be able to reach out to anyone using SwiftNet over SFTI -- by traversing the SFTI network into SunGard or ADP," Davies says.

A service bureau arrangement, Davies adds, means that clients needing to access SwiftNet no longer will have to invest in any Swift infrastructure. Seventy percent of new Swift customers access the network this way, which Davies says has reduced the costs of hooking up by as much as 95 percent.

Davies says he personally will attend the SIA tech show with his staff, even though Swift is a well-known entity in the financial services industry. "There are reasons to keep our name out front, but we also do get new customers from the SIA Conference," he says. "In addition to new customers, we see existing customers, and it is an easy way to get at more of those existing customers and get them to take more of our services."

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