SWIFT cuts costs with desktop managed service

Customer Overview

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is an industry-owned co-operative supplying secure, standardised messaging services and interface software to over 8,100 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.

Business Need

In order to ensure full control over its internal IT environment, SWIFT operates a central IT service management model from its HQ in Belgium. This is overseen by the Management of Internal Services (MIS) team, which sets the organisation's IT standards and is responsible for supporting 2,200 users around the globe.

These users were originally supported via three helpdesks in Belgium, Hong Kong and the US, which resulted in high management overheads. MIS also had to co-ordinate multiple in-country service providers and contracts, which often didn't have the flexibility needed to meet SWIFT's changing business requirements.This decentralised approach to IT support not only made it difficult to carry out global reporting but also to control service quality, which differed significantly depending on the country and service provider.

Solution

The SWIFT MIS team decided it could make significant service improvements and cost savings by consolidating its existing patchwork of service agreements into a single contract with a single global service provider.

As a result, in 2001, SWIFT signed its first desktop managed service contract with Computacenter. The company's ability to provide consistent, high-level services to users around the world and its understanding of SWIFT's business needs were key factors in the decision-making process.

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How Computacenter helped

The desktop managed service was initiated with a global audit of the existing estate, which helped to identify previously unrecorded assets and redundant equipment. After the audit, Computacenter successfully transitioned SWIFT's three helpdesks to a centralised service desk at its Belgium site. This service desk operates 24 hours a day, five days a week and supports users in countries as diverse as Australia, Brazil, Sweden and Japan.

Under the agreement, Computacenter provides permanent on-site engineers at SWIFT, who are backed up by extensive field engineering resources in each country. As well as providing desk-side support, Computacenter is also responsible for lifecycle asset management and assists with IT procurement.

Jurgen Strijkers, a Service Delivery Manager at Computacenter, commented: "The collaboration between SWIFT and Computacenter has evolved to become a true partnership. We are responsive to SWIFT's needs, share risk and meet SLAs successfully. These three elements are critical if we are to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction and deliver a cost effective service."

Results

The initial contract with Computacenter has since been renewed until 2009, and now includes critical support for SWIFT's internal call, problem and change management application. The decision to extend the partnership with Computacenter was independently benchmarked by Morgan Chambers. Werner Hellinckx, Head of Management of Internal Services for SWIFT comments: "The assessment results proved that we actually get a better-than-average service at a lower cost."

The centralisation of the service desk played a key role in helping to reduce
SWIFT's operational costs. SWIFT's improved visibility of its IT assets has also aided cost control, with more accurate forecasting. Other benefits resulting from the improved asset data include simplified software licensing and enhanced compliance. Computacenter has also been able to implement globally consistent processes for managing changes and incidents in a short timeframe.

"Our service level agreements with Computacenter allow us to provide the same level of service globally to all of our internal customers," comments Werner. "Using ITIL best practice, Computacenter has both standardised and improved the level of service, while a contractual cost reduction plan is helping SWIFT to reduce service costs year-on-year."