SWIFT announces major price reductions and commercial actions

SWIFT achieves pricing challenge of 50% reduction over 2002-2006

Brussels, 14 June 2006 — SWIFT, the industry-owned global financial messaging cooperative, announced today that its Board has approved price reductions and commercial actions that will return MEUR 70 to its community by end 2007. SWIFT also announced it has achieved its Pricing Challenge, set in 2001, to reduce overall messaging prices by 50% over the 2002-2006 timeframe.

The following price reductions and commercial actions are in effect from 1 July 2006:

• Price reductions on FIN messages range from 4% to 30%, resulting in an 8.2% decrease in average message price and benefiting all segments of the SWIFT community.
• For intra-institution traffic, new high volume discounts for large users will range from 20% to 36%.
• FIN-Copy and messages to market infrastructures will be reduced by 5.6%.
• A 10% reduction on InterAct prices for International traffic will further benefit market infrastructures users.
• Free Hardware Security Modules for the entire SWIFT community will help prepare for SWIFTNet Phase 2, saving users MEUR 23.
• SWIFTSupport Enhanced will be extended free of charge to users sending more than 0.25% of traffic. This increases our systemic coverage from a current 50% to 75% of SWIFT traffic.

Francis Vanbever, CFO, SWIFT said: “The value of these actions will be MEUR 38 over the second half of 2006 and MEUR 32 in 2007. Our strong traffic and revenue performance in 2006 indicates that we will exceed our financial objectives, and so we are able to finance additional investments to accelerate our SWIFT2010 strategic initiatives and at the same time to continue to reduce prices to strengthen our competitive position.”

To find out more about how the price cuts affect individual organisations, users should contact André Boico, Director, Pricing, Information Services and Analysis, SWIFT at andre.boico@swift.com.

About SWIFT
SWIFT is the industry-owned co-operative supplying secure, standardised messaging services and interface software to over 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. The SWIFT community includes banks, broker/dealers and investment managers, as well as their market infrastructures in payments, securities, treasury and trade. Over the past ten years, SWIFT message prices have been reduced over 70%, and system availability approaches 5x9’s reliability — 99.999% of uptime.

For more information about this press release, please contact the SWIFT press office:

Kara Condon
SWIFT
Tel: +32 2 655 3740
Email: kara.condon@SWIFT.com