Interactive Workstation for EBA CLEARING’s EURO1/STEP1 platform goes live

EBA CLEARING announced today that banks have started to monitor and control their payment flows on the EURO1/STEP1 platform with the help of a new Interactive Workstation (IWS) developed by SWIFT and EBA CLEARING. IWS-Browse, the first phase of this SWIFTNet-based solution, went live this morning after successful tests with 16 EBA CLEARING pilot banks.

“IWS-Browse is the first step towards fully replacing the current Clearing Workstation with a much more efficient solution,” said Oliver Bieser, responsible for euro clearing system IT at Deutsche Bank and a member of the IWS pilot group. “EBA CLEARING provides us with a state-of-the-art application based on market standards and with a better response time than today’s Workstation, as well as with lower costs for all banks.”

Based on the same technical principles as will be used by other Market Infrastructures, such as TARGET2, the IWS enhances the EURO1/STEP1 banks' possibilities to streamline their business processes. At the same time, the use of the SWIFTNet Services enables the banks to take better advantage of their SWIFTNet investment.

The IWS allows EBA CLEARING banks to directly save cost on messaging, as the use of SWIFTNet Browse, InterAct and FileAct comes at a considerably lower price than the FIN messages supported by the current Clearing Workstation. Furthermore, the maintenance of the new workstation will be less expensive because the IWS is based on standard software already in use by the EURO1/STEP1 banks. For some banks, the savings can be up to 70 percent compared with the use of the current Clearing Workstation.

“The development and implementation of the Interactive Workstation have been successful thanks to the good co-operation with the Banks in the project group and SWIFT's development team,” said Jette Simson, Manager, EURO1 Services, who was charged with the project. “We very much appreciated the major support the pilot banks gave to the whole project and particularly to the testing phase.” 

The second phase of the IWS project will focus on the Application Programming Interface (API), which will enable banks to integrate data into their back office applications. The API will be available from mid-2007 and will complete the implementation of the IWS. 

All the EURO1 and STEP1 banks are expected to finalise their migration from the current Clearing Workstation to the new Interactive Workstation by the end of December 2007.