SWIFT Releases ROI Study for GE

General Electric (GE; Fairfield, Conn.) has achieved a 406 percent return on investment from using the SWIFTNet Corporate-to-Bank (C2B) solution from SWIFT (La Hulpe, Belgium), the bank-owned messaging and infrastructure cooperative, according to a SWIFT study released on Wednesday.

GE Corporate Treasury now communicates with its multiple banking relationships using a Member Administrated Closed User Group (MA-CUG) through SWIFTNet. The solution obviates the need to maintain point-to-point solutions with each of 30 primary banks and 200 total banks across the globe, to manage over 20,000 bank accounts. Each bank required a unique messaging format, which meant that "GE IT was perpetually in upgrade/maintenance mode," according to the report.

The estimated $10.5 million of savings to GE Corporate Treasury stemmed from eliminating the need for IT to perform mapping and maintenance of the multiple messaging formats (48 percent); the elimination of the need for two full-time employees to monitor message traffic (22 percent); higher productivity of cash management operations (20 percent); software retirement (5 percent); cost avoidance for networking to multiple banks (4 percent); and hardware retirement (1percent).

Read more about the GE implementation in "GE Brings SWIFT to Life," from the October 2004 issue of Bank Systems & Technology.