National Bank of Romania migrates RTGS to SWIFT

SWIFT announced that the National Bank of Romania is now fully operational on SWIFT and has successfully completed its first month of live operations. The implementation comes as part of its strategy to strengthen the operational resilience and cyber-security of its RTGS and CSD.

In 2016, the National Bank of Romania (NBR) embarked on a project to upgrade their infrastructure to address these imperatives by migrating their RTGS (ReGIS) and CSD (SaFIR) operations from external subcontractors back to in-house control.

Discussions between NBR and SWIFT began in early 2016, an RFP was issued mid-year and the contract for the project was awarded at the end of 2016. Project implementation started in January 2017, with a target live date of March 2018.

„Following the successful completion of the project, NBR now processes through its RTGS (ReGIS) system, daily traffic of some 20,000 messages for 39 participants. In addition, its CSD system for government securities (SaFIR) has a traffic flow of some 12,000 FIN messages with these same participants.”, according to the press release.

„SWIFT is pleased to support the National Bank of Romania as it takes measures to further strengthen and future-proof its infrastructure.”, says Judit Baracs, Country Manager Romania, SWIFT.

„By adhering to international standards and minimizing operational risk, we are sure that NBR will now be better equipped than ever to serve all its market participants and support further growth.”, adds Matthieu de Heering, Head of Central and Eastern Europe, SWIFT.

SWIFT has been working with financial market infrastructures for over 40 years and serves more than 230 FMI around the world across payments, securities and treasury markets, allowing them to process transactions, mitigate risk, and increase their operational efficiency.