Swift

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Reliable Network Services for Global Banking Network SWIFT

Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, SWIFT has 7,500 users in 200 countries. The SWIFT community includes banks, brokers/dealers and investment managers as well as their associated market infrastructures in payments, securities, treasury and trade.

Challenge

In the early 1970s, banks communicated via telex, a communications system consisting of teletypewriters connected to telephone networks. This system was not very secure, had minimum standards and was not automated. In response to this challenging environment, 239 banks from 15 countries formed a cooperative to find ways of automating the telex. They called it the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT.

Today, the number of messages transmitted via SWIFT regularly exceeds eight million per day, with an average transit time of less than 20 seconds. The SWIFT network spans the globe, utilizing services from a number of network providers.

Solution

A significant part of the SWIFT core infrastructure - its backbone - is provided by Sprint, including its high-capacity connections between its global data centers.

SWIFT has recently renewed its ten-year relationship with Sprint. Sprint international private lines (IPLs) support the SWIFT backbone network at nodes in Europe, Asia and the U.S. The IPLs are an integral part of the SWIFT backbone, ensuring that communications traffic is delivered reliably and at a high speed.

The Sprint IPL service is designed for point-to-point applications and provides maximum availability for critical business services, helping SWIFT deliver technical excellence to its members.

Bottom line

SWIFT depends on Sprint to ensure that its mission-critical transatlantic traffic will arrive quickly and reliably. Since the company's IPLs are managed end-to- end by Sprint, service delivery has been improved through streamlined service management backed by strong global service level agreements, 24 x 7 support and service restoration.

Why Sprint?

When you choose Sprint, you're in good company. In fact, 95% of the FORTUNE 1000® use Sprint for combinations of data, Internet, voice or wireless solutions. When you select Sprint, you're doing business with a global company that:

• Has a rich heritage more than a century strong and remains one of the most financially stable companies in the telecom industry
• Provides multinational enterprises, Internet service providers and carriers global data and Internet services in more than 100 countries worldwide
• Has won industry and customer accolades for service reliability, cost effectiveness, customer satisfaction and product innovation
• Is committed to developing solutions that can transform the way you get business done

"Over the past ten years, Sprint has proved to be a stable and reliable business partner for SWIFT, providing secure service which is the paramount factor for the financial industry that we serve."
Eddy Verbruggen, telecom vendor relationship manager, SWIFT

FORTUNE 1000® is a registered trademark of FORTUNE magazine, a division of Time inc.

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