•   FX broker copes with 400% increase in payments and gears up for exponential growth

LONDON, 22 April 2009 – SMA Financial (www.sma.co.uk), SWIFT Regional partner for UK, Eire and Channel Islands today announced that World First (www.worldfirst.com), the UK's fastest growing foreign exchange broker, has achieved significant operational efficiencies with SMA Financial’s SWIFT Bureau Service.  A joint project involving the broker’s main banking partner Barclays Commercial Bank and SMA delivered a highly efficient automated payments processing environment.

Jabu Henson, Chief Operating Officer at World First explained, “We are about to launch an online trading platform that will provide an easy to use, safe and secure foreign exchange service to our clients. Payment volumes have soared 400% in just two years with exponential growth forecasted for the future. The SWIFT capabilities through SMA and Barclays Commercial Bank will allow us to offer a fully automated end-to-end solution i.e. straight through processing (STP) from a client initiated transaction to our back office, and then on to payment instruction and confirmation.”

Barclays Commercial Bank recommended SMA’s Bureau Service as its preferred option for outsourced SWIFT connectivity.  World First also conducted a market evaluation as Henson comments, “SMA could demonstrate a competitive bureau solution that was proven in action at similar companies.  Barclays merely confirmed our analysis that the SMA Bureau Service best met our needs.”

World First has a skilled IT team and once SMA confirmed the data and integration requirements, the changes were rapidly made to the back office system.  The broker now sends and receives MT101, MT103 and MT195 messages.  The latter has given the broker the ability to raise investigation cases more rapidly, has led to a faster resolution of exception items and thus lowering of operational risk.

Henson concluded, “We set out to create a lean back office with high levels of operational efficiency.  Thanks to the hard work of our IT team along with the professionals from SMA and Barclays Commercial Bank we now have a high degree of payments automation and STP.  Additionally the infrastructure is in place to benefit from SWIFT messaging standards and this means we can manage our future payments growth.”

Simon Murby, Managing Director, SMA Financial said, “Working with Barclays  Commercial Bank, we have been able to leverage the knowledge gained from many installations of our SWIFT Bureau Service to deliver trouble free SWIFT connectivity projects.  By drawing upon SMA’s fully accredited team of SWIFT consultants, World First has been able to supplement its own IT resources to achieve excellent operational results.”