An EFAMA survey with SWIFT revealed that the automation rate of orders received by Luxembourg and Irish transfer agents reached 77 percent, compared to 75.6 percent in Q4 2011.
The total automation rate increase is driven by increased adoption of the ISO messaging standard (+ 4.4 percentage points since Q4 2011) and a decrease in the use of proprietary file transfer protocols (ftps) (-3.1 percentage points) and faxes (- 1.4 percentage points).
In Luxemburg, the total automation rate increased to 73.1 percent, while in Ireland, total automation rate is now at 84.6 percent. While ftps still represent the bulk of it, the ISO adoption rate made a progression of 4.2 percentage points to 17.3 percent in Q2 2012.
The ISO standardisation rate has doubled in Ireland over the last two years, reaching 17.3 percent in Q2 2012 against 8.5 percent in Q2 2010.
The total number of orders has stabilised at 11.9 million orders in the first half of 2012. The number of manually processed orders decreased by 7 percent to 2.8 million received faxes: a daily average of some 25,000 incoming faxes.
Peter De Proft, EFAMA director general, said: “In the previous edition of the report, we set the goal for the industry to move closer to the 80 percent threshold for total automation rate in 2012. The mid-year 77 percent rate is an achievement to applaud and a very positive step in this direction.”
Fabian Vandenreydt, head of securities markets at SWIFT, added that standardisation will allow the industry to further reduce the 25.000 orders per day that are still treated by fax.”
