Cash & Liquidity Management
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SWIFT for Treasury Investments at Intel

by Don Davis, Intel Treasury

Intel has been involved with SWIFT for many years to manage large receivables on which we needed detailed remittance information. We have also been active in promoting and formulating new messaging standards through RosettaNet, with the ultimate outcome of ISO 20022 financial messaging. With this heritage and industry insight, we wanted to leverage some of the opportunities that were available for more efficient payments, securities management and reporting. We therefore decided to implement SWIFTNet for high value payments and securities in the treasury investments area.

Background to the project

Before implementing SWIFT, most of our payments in treasury investments were routed to Citi and Euroclear through proprietary systems, although we also made payments through other banks, such as Deutsche Bank in India, J.P. Morgan in the United States etc. We wanted to achieve greater standardisation in the way that we communicated with our banking partners, and replace the various proprietary systems with a single channel. Cost was not necessarily a key driver, but we recognised that a cohesive bank connectivity infrastructure would be easier and more cost-effective to maintain than supporting multiple systems.

We wanted to achieve greater standardisation in the way that we communicated with our banking partners, and replace the various proprietary systems with a single channel.

The catalyst for SWIFT

The trigger for the project was the installation of a new treasury management system (TMS) SunGard’s AvantGard. This gave us the ideal opportunity to implement SWIFT rather than replacing our proprietary interfaces. We purchased the software at the end of 2007/early 2008 and joined SWIFT in May/June 2008. The connection to SWIFT was straightforward in our case, as we decided to connect indirectly, using SunGard’s service bureau. We now send MT101, MT103 and MT210 messages to our banks through SWIFT, currently in the test environment, as well as MT541 and MT543 securities messages.