SunGard today announced that Deutsche Bank, one of the world's leading financial services providers, has completed the consolidation of its global financial messaging to a global messaging architecture (GMA), using SunGard's STeP MINT solution as the foundation (http://www.sungard.com/step).
The GMA program was developed by Deutsche Bank to deliver significant operational cost savings and to provide standardised, global service levels across its entire range of banking services.
Deutsche Bank developed the GMA initiative to consolidate the fragmented financial messaging infrastructure created after 15 years of significant growth.
The bank was running multiple gateways to SWIFT and the decentralised nature of its IT operations led to highly complex and costly infrastructures, supported by individual local teams across the globe. SWIFT's move from X.25 to SWIFTNet sparked the GMA project to ensure SWIFTNet compliance without the need to invest further in legacy applications.
Deutsche Bank chose SunGard as the foundation for its global messaging infrastructure because of SunGard's ability to leverage SWIFTNet migrations through a consolidated operations approach. STeP MINT provides a flexible infrastructure for message routing and guaranteed delivery. It acts as a hub that handles all communications across applications, networks and branches, offering external interfaces to SWIFT, Crest and other utilities.
The global migration and consolidation project was completed on schedule, helping Deutsche Bank to decommission legacy applications and their associated infrastructures. STeP has helped Deutsche Bank recognise the benefits of consolidation by reducing its SWIFT connection points from 42 to two, with global gateways in Frankfurt and London. Deutsche Bank is also using STeP MINTNet routing to deliver messages internally across branches and lines of business.
The GMA project with STeP MINT has already been a significant contributor in enabling Deutsche Bank to significantly reduce its operating costs, with full savings recognised in 2006.
The GMA initiative has provided a resilient and secure infrastructure for the processing of both today's and any future financial messaging transactions with a single, common and standard point of access to Deutsche Bank messaging services globally. The ambitious goals which were set for GMA have been fully achieved and in some areas exceeded.
Tom King, president of SunGard's STeP business unit, said: "The completion of the Deutsche Bank GMA project is a significant success for STeP. Deutsche Bank shared our strategic vision to consolidate operations as part of the migration to SWIFTNet. By choosing STeP MINT for this project, Deutsche Bank is now SWIFTNet compliant, is able to easily build out new services globally, and is well positioned to take on-board other SWIFTNet services, such as Real Time Cash Reporting, EBA Step2, and Target 2."
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