Swiss Post Installs Payment System

PostFinance, a division of Swiss Post and the leading provider of mass-payment processing services in Switzerland, has installed enterprise application integration software from SeeBeyond, Redwood Shores, Calif.

The software will speed the processing of mass payment transactions and account statements for PostFinance's 30,000 partners over EDI and SWIFT. In addition, electronic account statements for 200,000 e-banking users have been initiated, and will ultimately replace all inter-application data flows.

SeeBeyond's flagship e*Gate Integrator platform met PostFinance's requirements for a high-volume processing solution capable of handling over 7 million payment instructions in 16 hours.

By integrating and managing processes between back office applications, SeeBeyond facilitates payment processing and account statements for PostFinance's large corporate and private client base.

The SeeBeyond installation is the beginning of a five- to seven-year project covering all intra-enterprise data transformation. "The system went live on the 21st of October, and it has been stable since," said Stephan Sutter, application architect at PostFinance.

PostFinance has provided a basic payment service throughout Switzerland for nearly 100 years. Since the 1990s, the organization has increasingly developed into a complete financial institution, featuring services associated with payment transactions, such as savings, investments, risk protection and cash advisement. There are also plans to offer loans as part of PostFinance's ongoing development process.

SeeBeyond enables PostFinance to respond to changes in the market, something it couldn't do before.

"To respond to the increasing pressures in the financial services market, we must offer our clients a superior level of service in terms of processing times and data accuracy," according to Sutter.

"To achieve this we needed a real-time integration infrastructure that would support high performance levels and could also scale enough to handle future growth," he added.

PostFinance was impressed by SeeBeyond's scalable architecture and ability to deliver a significant return on investment by reducing programming and maintenance expenses.

In financial services, rapid throughput of data and volume processing are essential. Critical in addressing this challenge is the integration of existing systems across applications within the organization.

A provider of e-business and application integration solutions, SeeBeyond offers a unified, comprehensive platform for business integration, enabling a real-time information network to facilitate the seamless flow of information.

SeeBeyond specializes in delivering high performance, scalable solutions for mass payment processing.

"Reducing the cost and complexity of communication with partners is key," said David Bennett, vice president and general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa for SeeBeyond.

"We have taken our knowledge and best practices in the areas of business-to-business integration and SWIFT to increase operational efficiency," he added.

The SeeBeyond Business Integration suite helps organizations improve business operations resulting in reduced costs, increased market share and improved customer service.

The company has more than 1,725 customers worldwide, including ABB, ABN AMRO, Bausch & Lomb, BHP Billiton, BMW Group, The Dial Corporation, DuPont, Florida Power & Light, Fluor Daniel, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer and Sprint.