BankservAfrica to use Strate's SWIFT Services

"After a long-standing working relationship with the BankservAfrica group, we are excited to have them join and utilise Strate's SWIFT infrastructure. We believe that we offer one of the best SWIFT infrastructures in the world and are pleased to have more clients seeing the benefits and coming on board," said Rudi Steenkamp, head of IT at Strate.

Strate, South Africa's Central Securities Depository (CSD), manages one of Africa's largest SWIFT infrastructures and it is one of the top 2 percent of SWIFT users globally. Strate's SWIFT Bureau Service allows clients to save costs and, ultimately, bring new efficiencies to their own organisations.

Costs shared

Dan van der Westhuizen, CEO for financial and technology solutions of BSVA Integrated Services (a member of the BankservAfrica group) explained that by joining Strate's SWIFT network, the cost of acquiring, upgrading and maintaining the hardware and software required to connect to SWIFT is shared between all bureau participants. "The BSVA SWIFT bureau provides our customers (in over 16 African countries) with an affordable low-cost (outsourced) solution in order to send and receive messages on the SWIFT network. The SWIFT service bureau also ensures automation and standardisation of transactions using end-to-end solutions, leading to risk mitigation and increasing company service levels, all undertaken securely and reliably."

Strate's SWIFT infrastructure currently carries the bulk of financial messages for the equity, money market and bonds settlement systems, as well as all of the JSE and brokers' messages. The Strate SWIFT infrastructure provides full redundancy in the form of an on-site "hot standby" and an off-site disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure.

State-of-the-art IBM infrastructure

Steenkamp said: "Strate has the best SWIFT infrastructure in Africa, and due to its varied network connectivity options, it has the capacity to host new clients, bringing them all the associated benefits. Strate has a Premium Plus Partnership with SWIFT and a cost-effective and state-of-the-art IBM infrastructure, which are among the benefits Strate provides. In addition, Strate offers 24/7 monitoring and support, which includes support of an on-call SWIFT engineer.

"Clients who utilise the Strate SWIFT infrastructure, will benefit from the reduction of costs in terms of acquiring, upgrading and maintaining the hardware and software components required to connect to the SWIFT network as these are shared between all Bureau participants," concluded Steenkamp.