Colt and SIA Partnership Wins 4CBNet Award
Colt, in partnership with SIA, has won the tender issued by Deutsche Bundesbank, on behalf of Banca d’Italia, Banque de France and Banco de España (the four central banks, or 4CB), to create and deliver the network infrastructure connecting the four that manage the single Eurosystem platform for the settlement of large-value payments and securities transactions.
The 4-CentralBank-Network (4CBNet) is due to go live by September 2013 and will provide a high-speed backbone (10 Gigabits)ensuring continuity of information flows for the four central banks, preserving integrity and confidentiality. Colt and SIA have pledged to deliver an intelligent network infrastructure able to constantly monitor and manage the data traffic in a fully automated way, avoiding any single point of failure.
These capabilities enable the synchronisation of the four central banks’ data centres, providing a single virtual infrastructure to support the geographical distribution of vital applications for the European financial system. TARGET2, the platform of payments in euro for the real-time settlement of high-value transactions in central bank money, is already in live use. TARGET2- Securities, the single European platform for the settlement of domestic and cross-border securities transactions, will go-live in 2015.
TARGET2 and TARGET2-Securities (T2S) are part of the initiatives for the creation of the single European market after the euro, single euro payments area (SEPA) and Payment Services Directive (PSD). According to estimates by the European Central Bank (EBC), TARGET2-Securities will process a daily average of over one million securities transactions, as well as contributing to significant cost reduction of cross-border settlements.
SIA and Colt said that their partnership, which was awarded a network service provider (NSP) license for T2S last year, is further strengthened with the implementation of the 4CBNet project. This confirms the technological leadership in the financial sector and the strong European presence of the two companies.