Working together for SEPA succes
With the right solutions financial institutions can realise the economic benefits of SEPA. The Autumn issue was launched and distributed in Amsterdam, at Sibos.
Business Information Systems’ article here.
Month: September 2010
Please see attached the article covering the first SWIFT Business Forum organized in the Romanian Banking Institute Conference Hall, on the 15th of September 2010.
They say third time is a charm; well, in Amsterdam, it’s the third time we’re exhibiting at Sibos, preparing for at least same success as in Vienna and Hong Kong.
Our Sibos team’s life in four weeks from now will be fully coded. Stand Code – B202; Dress Code – Office; SWIFT Partner Code – SPXAROBU; Visitors Codes – Demos/Presentations; Giveaways Code – Tradition; Offered Wine Code – Black Maiden; Program Code – Scheduled. More, each day during Sibos, the luckiest eight of our visitors will be offered a special gift, a beautiful hand-made glass icon, from a North Romanian Monastery.
So come and visit us, book a meeting before the event starts or just drop by, it will be our pleasure to welcome you in our stand.
If you’d like to meet us on Wednesday the 27th morning, come first in Community 4 to attend our session within “Brought to you by the Community”, 9.00-10.30, where important panelists will debate and then answer your questions on the subject “Streamlining the Financial Supply Chain Ecosystem”.
Further, on Thursday, the 28th, come and see the SWIFT debate on Workers’ Remittances, we’ll have a panelist here (who’ll share our team’s experience on developing the concept into a bankers’ business tool, banking and technological trends, lessons learned in discussing this opportunity with our customers), in Community 1, 11.00-12.30, “Workers’ Remittances: Your global platform for person-to-person payments”.
In the end, let me wish you all good luck, safe trip and see you there! You’re invited, no codes required…
Allevo and ATE Bank Romania improve operational risk containment through an efficient business continuity plan
Allevo and ATE Bank Romania have successfully completed the setup of their business continuity plan by implementing FMA.
Originally designed for ensuring real time, asynchronous mirroring of financial messages sent and received via SWIFT network from one geographic site to another, FMA also provides the bank with the following additional features:
- transaction mirroring engine monitoring subsystem (from both business and technical perspective)
- procedure & event management subsystem providing: working procedures management (create, update & disseminate), business continuity and disaster recovery and planned events support
- eLearning support.
FMA provides an embedded electronic plan for business continuity and disaster recovery in case of a crisis. Allevo solution targets SWIFT and operations departments of a bank and provides services for all stages of the Business Continuity Plan, from initiation to strategy, implementation, testing and updating the plans and procedures, in a collaborative environment which allows users to manage operational risks while performing business-as-usual.
Based on the high virtualization degree, FMA helps ATE Bank to save important resources while maintaining (recurring tests includes) the Business Continuity Plan.
FMA‘s centralized approach, in a collaborative environment, to procedure and policies management, helps ATE Bank contain the operational risks and reduce the percentage of human error, while increasing productivity and taking full control of the financial activities during planned events (migrations, periodic maintenance, installation of new equipment and software), as well as during low-level incidents or disasters/disruptions.
This initiative demonstrates again that the cooperation based on complementary skills and assets is an efficient approach to strengthen the beneficiaries’ business, enabling them to provide more secure and uninterrupted services to their customers.
“Using Allevo FMA solution and teaming with Allevo professionals enabled us to cope even with unforeseeable events, to know exactly the amount of time to recover our activities to full capacity level, and zero data loss” states George Lazar, IT Manager ATE Bank.
“Ensuring the continuation of business functionality at all times and under any circumstances and implementing a business continuity program, while managing operational risks is critical to a bank’s payment business; the parties’ assigned teams cooperated efficiently to ensure that ATE Bank is covered from this crucial point of view” says Sorin Guiman, CEO Allevo.
The partnership between Business Information Systems and Raiffeisen Bank Romania has been awarded, at the Gala of e-Finance Prizes.
The e-Support Prize for the first Romanian Anti Money Laundering software deployed solution – handling large transaction volume.
Ion Stirbat, Director Sales & Marketing, Member of the Board, BIS and Ionel Fierascu – Director, Compliance Directorate, Raiffeisen Bank Romania received the prizes on behalf of the two winner companies.
Business Information Systems, the Romanian Banking Association and the Romanian Banking Institute joined forces to organize this exclusive event, having the following agenda:
10:00 – 10:30 Welcome
Speaker: Radu Gratian Ghetea, President Romanian Banking Association, Chairperson Romanian SWIFT Member Group
Stephan Kraft, SWIFT Country Manager Romania
10:30 – 11:15 SWIFT Solutions for Low-value Payments
Speaker: Judit Baracs, Manager Payments Markets Initiatives Central & Eastern Europe, SWIFT
11:15 – 12:00 Managing liquidity risk in a changed and global world
Speaker: Catherine Banneux, Senior Market Manager Banking, SWIFT
12:30 – 13:15 Liquidity risk – a Market Assessment
Speaker: Catherine Banneux , Senior Market Manager Banking, SWIFT
14:15 – 14:45 Facilitating Cash Visibility for Corporate Customers
Speaker: Stephan Kraft, Senior Account Director, Central & Eastern Europe, SWIFT
14:45 – 15:30 Success Story: Real-time Liquidity Forecasting at Conwert Austria
Speaker: Christian Brühne, Treasury System Implementation Manager, Conwert
16:00 – 17:15: Streamlining the Financial Supply Chain Ecosystem – Round-table
Speakers: Robert Rekkers, President Banca Transilvania
Stefan Nanu, World Bank Romania’s Representative
Laurentiu Andrei, Deputy General Director, Treasury and Public Debt Department, Ministry of Public Finance
Ruud van der Horst, Independent Consultant
Rodica Tuchila, Chairperson Romanian SWIFT User Group
BIS Representative
17:15 – 17:30: Conclusions
Intercontinental Hotel
BIS’ was invited to state its point of view on connectivity solutions at the ceremony of Romanian Securities Market Practice Group debut and the Memorandum CSD (Depozitarul Central) & SWIFT signing.
Ms Corina Mihalache held the “Central Securities Depository to community – a new way to talk -” presentation.
We scheduled this event following the SWIFT Business Forum Romania (15th of September) which we co-organized.
The Senior Account Director for Central and Eastern Europe from SWIFT, the Treasury System Implementation Manager of an Austrian Company, and several corporations’ treasury/financial managers honoured our invitation to attend and present their ideas and point of views.
The experience of the Austrian company with using SWIFT channel for its financial operations, then restructuring trends for the distribution channels of financial products & services and drawing up the plan for financial operations efficiency, were some of the themes that led to a fruitful dialogue.
Workers’ Remittances are generally defined as cross-border, person-to-person payments of relatively low-value. It’s about any type of payment product or channel (account, cash, cards), including mobile payments; the qPI-WR feature of qPayIntegrator ensures the collections, processing and distribution of remittances using WR pacs.
As a successful result of a several months work in this direction, BIS’ team passed the Technical and Functional Validation for the qPayIntegrator suite within the SWIFT certification programme SWIFTReady Workers’ Remittances.
This accomplishment will be stated in a Letter of Conformity that’s on our way.
We are at the service of any interested commercial bank to fulfill the required certification tests.