Sysco treasury opts for SWIFT Service Bureau

The treasurer of Sysco Corporation, a US marketing and food distribution firm, has argued that the best way for corporate treasurers to connect to the SWIFT Network via a SWIFT Service Bureau.

Carrie Reyna, Sysco’s director of treasury operations, says the firm concluded this after surveying vendors connecting to SWIFT with the capabilities to connect Sysco too.

Sysco’s treasury team then evaluated the goals and budgets for three different scenarios: when a treasury builds its infrastructure, uses Alliance Lite 2 or a uses SWIFT Service Bureau.

Sysco chose Axletree Solutions to implement a SWIFT connection which took about six weeks once contracts were signed, according to Reyna.

When evaluating a SWIFT Service Bureau a treasury department should look for, “customer service, system availability and a good disaster recovery plan,” says Reyna. It is also important to have “maintenance times which make sense with our business operations and occur when files from banks are not being transmitted,” she adds.

The higher level of service and support in events such as failure of messages was reportedly another key reason for Sysco to chose a SWIFT Service Bureau.

“Our goal was to stop having host-to-host (H2H) connections with banks and use SWIFT for any transmissions from our banks to Sysco. With our H2H connections, if an SFTP server was down, the only option was to call the bank and have them resend the file,” she says.

This can take about 30 to 45 minutes and getting the right person to talk to the bank was always an issue, Reyna says.

“Currently, we use our SWIFT Connectivity to receive BAI, MT940, MT942 and MT101 files,” says Reyna. She adds that when using a SWIFT Service Bureau, if a server goes down files are re-sent from Axletree without having to go through the banks.

“For my team, we learned that using FileAct was the most efficient way for us to communicate with the banks,” she concludes.

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