Securities Messaging Traffic Growing 31 Percent Annually on SWIFT

By Greg MacSweeney, Wall Street & Technology

Although securities messaging traffic has grown to 45 percent of overall SWIFT message traffic and has an average annual growth of more than 30 percent per year during the past 10 years, said Leonard Schrank, CEO, SWIFT, at the Sibos 2006 conference in Sydney, SWIFT is still having a difficult time attracting asset managers to the SWIFT community. By comparison, payments has grown 13 percent annually during the same time period."We need to bring in more securities experience to SWIFT and bring more securities attendees to Sibos," Schrank said during the Sibos press conference. "We are not there yet when it comes to reaching the asset management community." SWIFT does not have statistics on the number of fund managers who attending Sibos this year, however the percentage of people attending the conference from the securities industry is 15.62 percent of the approximately 5,000 SIBOS attendees (including delegates, exhibitors and press).

Newly appointed SWIFT chairman Yawar Shah, who is also EVP, global operations, worldwide securities services at JPMorgan Chase, says that the worldwide payments organization is actively working with members of the asset management community. "Asset managers do have unique needs, and I know that my clients have been keen on using SWIFT."

At the Sibos conference, SWIFT also announced a 5 percent rebate on all SWIFT messaging services, amounting to more than $25 million (EUR 20 million) in total rebates. Francis Vanbever, CFO of SWIFT, commented in a release: "Strong 13.4 percent traffic growth year to date and a two-year program to reduce expenses structurally by 10 percent have enabled us to decrease messaging prices significantly."

Asked if it would be more efficient to lower prices, rather than give a rebate back to members at the end of the year, Schrank responded, "Obviously we would like to have the right pricing, but no one has ever sent a rebate back to us." Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio