Trustlink, pioneer in business-to-business process optimisation and the leading SWIFT service bureau in Africa, is proud to announce that it has recently been awarded the prestigious SWIFTReady Connectivity Best Practice label from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).
The Best Practice label is the highest level of certification that a SWIFT service bureau can achieve, and the stringent conditions required to be met to become accredited cover a range of operational requirements and best practice criteria.
Trustlink is the first and only SWIFT service bureau in Africa to achieve this level, and is also just the sixth in the world to be awarded the label of Best Practice.
“In order to maintain the most rigorous standards, SWIFT recently updated all of their requirements for service bureaux. As we have always subscribed to their codes of practice, we undertook the new certifications with enthusiasm, obtaining the Operational Assurance label in 2010 and then moving on to the Best Practice label, which we were awarded in January 2011,” says Andre Niemand, Manager: Hosted Services at Trustlink.
Obtaining the SWIFTReady Best Practice label required Trustlink to meet the high standards set in terms of physical infrastructure, people and processes. This necessitated an upgrade to infrastructure and connectivity in order to meet redundancy and capacity levels, ensuring that skills requirements were covered through certified engineers and superior levels of service, and implementing operational procedures that meet international standards.
“Getting to this level is part of our strategic business objectives, as it shows our dedication towards providing the very best service and gives our customers peace of mind that we comply with the toughest criteria set by SWIFT. We focused on three Ps: platform, people and procedure, ensuring that all of these areas met the published guidelines and worked together to deliver a seamless, integrated SWIFT service, and our hard work paid off after the onsite inspection and audit was conducted by SWIFT, and we were awarded the label of Best Practice,” adds Dave Elliott, Executive Manager: Solutions at Trustlink.
This dedication towards providing subscribers with the highest levels of service measured against international standards permeates the entire organisation at Trustlink, which last year achieved a milestone in service, delivering 288 business days of totally uninterrupted end-to-end service. This equates to 14 months of service delivery without a single disruption, something which is very important to the company's customers, including such big names as Allan Gray, Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, the Banks of Namibia and Zambia, Eskom, Bidvest, Computershare and Telkom, as they rely on Trustlink to provide mission-critical systems and services.
“We are delighted that Trustlink has achieved this level of certification, as ensuring that SWIFT service bureaux can offer the highest possible level of service to customers is of the utmost importance. The Best Practice label provides customers with an added assurance as to the operational efficiency of Trustlink as a bureau, who play an important role in connecting users to the SWIFT network. Their customers can be guaranteed that Trustlink complies with international best practices and service levels,” says Edward Leach, Head of Africa South at SWIFT.
Continuous service improvement is part and parcel of the ethos at Trustlink, evidenced by a continuing interest in improving infrastructure, obtaining new certifications and delivering additional value added services to customers.
“Obtaining the Best Practice label is part of our bigger picture strategy, and proves that we have the capability to deliver world-class services to our customers and subscribers,” says Hugo Smit, CEO of Trustlink.
“I believe this is a stepping stone for us, as it proves the quality of our business and will allow us to expand into other areas, adding more services to our bureau, optimising other areas of business-to-business process, and improving our value add for customers. We now have the confidence that our infrastructure and internal operational disciplines are on par with the best in the world,” he concludes.
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