BT announces secure messaging service for financial institutions

BT today announced that its Managed Secure Messaging service is now available to financial institutions in the Middle East. The service allows the financial community to exchange messages securely, reliably and in a non-repudiable manner over BT private networks and the internet for all of their business activities. The service is designed to meet the security requirements of the region’s banks, clearing houses and securities depositories as well as corporate treasurers.

BT Managed Secure Messaging can help cut costs by increasing the automation of message processing, reducing messaging failures and the manual administrative expense of correcting them. By ensuring that a message is secure, tamper-free and delivered in a non-repudiable manner, users can have confidence that messages sent and received remain unchanged and confidential.

BT’s Managed Secure Messaging service is unlike many messaging services. It records that each message has been sent and received, and informs both parties that it has been delivered correctly. BT-supplied hardware or software gateways at both sending and receiving ends ensure that messages are encrypted, kept secure and intrusion-free.

For example, banks use secure messaging to exchange payment messages with their corporate customers, and for securities settlement messages with investment managers. Corporate treasurers use secure messaging to interface their own financial systems directly with those of their banks, so that they can better manage liquidity. Central Counterparties (CCPs) and Central Securities Depositories (CSDs) use secure messaging to exchange messages with their member-firms. BT’s new Managed Secure Messaging Service is aimed at helping these types of organizations to increase their operational efficiency more cost-effectively.

Wael El Kabbany, MD ast BT Middle East and North Africa, said: “The need for secure, tamper-proof and non-repudiable messaging between parties in financial transactions continues to grow. BT’s Managed Secure Messaging service enables organisations to reduce their failure rates, reduce the costs of correcting those failures, and increase service levels to their customers. It is a single messaging tool that allows customers to communicate with everyone across their business community. We strongly believe that this new service adds great value to our BT Radianz Community.”

BT has provided customised managed secure messaging services for individual organisations in the financial sector since 1996. Each day these services deliver messages, effectively transferring hundreds of billions of pounds, securely, reliably and in a non-repudiable manner with no messages lost.