17/08-09   -   Press releases

Logica’s Messaging Hub, FASTWIRE Open, Benchmarks at Record Five Million Messages Per Day

Logica (LSE:LOG) (Amsterdam:LOG), a leading IT and business services company, today announced the results of a high-performance benchmark test carried out on FASTWIRE Open, Logica’s messaging hub, powered by IBM processors. The hub can now process over five million SWIFT Fin messages per day. The test was carried out in conjunction with a tier one banking client, which is one of world´s largest users of SWIFT – demonstrating the hub’s ability to support global banks.

FASTWIRE Open can scale to support the future growth of user banks, enabling them to not only reduce operational and network costs but also to take advantage of high throughput and adaptability to meet their demanding and growing requirements.

“Banks need to gain greater efficiencies if they are to preserve profit margins, given escalating payments volumes and sustained revenue pressure," said Andy Schmidt, research director at TowerGroup. “Centralised messaging hubs that are scalable and integrated give banks the flexibility and control that their payments businesses require. This allows banks to achieve savings through reduced messaging costs – savings that can be passed on to clients."

Tim Brew, director of global financial products at Logica, commented: “Payments volumes are increasing exponentially as global banks continue to grow, either organically or through M&A activity. Our high performing financial messaging hub enables banks to reduce costs by consolidating their multiple systems onto regional or global hubs. The client that participated in this test has proven that its future FASTWIRE Open-based messaging platform will support significant growth in its messaging traffic. The solution can clearly support our clients’ business expansion, but it also enables banks to reduce the overall cost per message and handle the ever increasing occurrence of unexpected volume peaks in messages."

The benchmark test was undertaken by Logica at IBM’s performance testing facility in Montpellier, France, during June 2009. FASTWIRE Open, Logica’s messaging hub, achieved a throughput of up to 200 messages per second, while actively using only 16 processors, exceeding the target of 150 messages per second.

For the test, the system processed SWIFT format messages while concurrently managing day-to-day activities such as archiving and database replication. The platform used an Oracle 10g database, operating with Oracle RAC and Dataguard, and was based on IBM 64-Core Power6 5GHz Based Power 595.

About Logica

Logica is a leading IT and business services company, employing 40,000 people. It provides business consulting, systems integration, and IT and business process outsourcing services. Logica works closely with its customers to release their potential - enabling change that increases their efficiency, accelerates growth and manages risk. It applies its deep industry knowledge, technical excellence and global delivery expertise to help its customers build leadership positions in their markets. Logica is listed on both the London Stock Exchange and Euronext (Amsterdam) (LSE: LOG; Euronext: LOG). More information is available at www.logica.com.

About Logica’s payments expertise

Logica has more than 30 years of experience in delivering payments products to the largest financial institutions. Logica is the only company to provide an end-to-end payments hub enabling banks to move from duplicated, siloed payments systems to a modern hub environment. Logica’s All Payments Solution (LAPS) can process the full range of payment types (retail, domestic, international, urgent/timed, single and mass payments) within a single deployment. It is fully SEPA compliant and live, supporting SEPA in over 10 countries. LAPS is the only payments hub capable of supporting SEPA transactions beyond current domestic-level requirements. It can provide any global bank with a single consolidated Europe-wide SEPA deployment for when payments traffic merges in the near future from domestic to SEPA. Furthermore, this massively scalable and high performing solution enables banks to optimise hardware utilisation and reduce infrastructure costs. For further information, visit http://www.logica.com/payments/400012772

About FASTWIRE Open

FASTWIRE Open is Logica’s high-end, network independent messaging platform. Based on Logica’s proven service-oriented open architecture, it delivers high performance and reliability on modern low cost infrastructures. It processes and routes all message types including payments and securities messages in SWIFT, ISO, XML and proprietary formats – enabling banks to choose the most cost effective route saving on unnecessary transaction fees.