Any SWIFT user who has signed an agreement with the Service Bureau.

They have many advantages for the clients – no initial fee, no sanctions for early termination, the individual exploitation costs are lower than the costs of each independent commutation connection and half of the minimum costs for independent not-commutation connection.

The installation and maintenance of software used by the clients of SWIFT Service Bureau (the SWIFTAlliance, SWIFTNet product family) is provided by the so called Service Partners, accredited by SWIFT. Currently, there is no such Service Partner in Bulgaria. Following the successful launching of the Service Bureau, Bankservice JSC plans to get accreditation as a SWIFT Service Partner.

Clients are differentiated in separate categories in accordance with their traffic. This differentiation affects only the price of services offered by the Service Bureau, but not the quality, safety or reliability of these services. The nature of technological solutions used provides for equality of all clients of the Service Bureau – there is no separation in terms of time, priority or other mechanisms for different treatment of clients.

For clients of the Service Bureau using only the services offered by the Service Bureau, there is no need to sign a contract with Network Partner for access to SWIFTNet, fees for Access Port to SWIFT, maintenance fees of the SWIFTNet Link software which is mandatory for SWIFTNet connection. Comparison of costs of payable by a SWIFT user for different types of connections show that in case of connection through the Service Bureau the costs are lower that these for any independent commutation connection and half of the minimum costs for any independent non-commutation connection. See table

Comparative table of costs of any SWIFT user for SWIFTNet connection

In addition, it is also to consider the SWIFT plans, as officially announced, to abolish the option of using a Dial-up as main connection, as well as the transfer from Single-I or Dual-I Economy (speed 64Kb, of which 8Kb guaranteed where 2Kb are for service traffic) to Dual-I Standard (full 64Kb). This would cost to SWIFT users with such independent connection one-off costs in the range of five to thirteen thousand USDollars and increase in the current costs by two to ten thousand USDollrs a year.

As regards the payment of SWIFT services used, the Service Bureau clients shall continue to pay to SWIFT their traffic individually, i.e. there will be no traffic aggregation at the service level regardless of the shared connection.

At present the ratio between costs for this traffic (SWIFTNet FIN) to other communication costs (to SWIFT and possibly, Network Partner) varies from 1:2 for banks with big traffic (over 1,000 FIN messages a day) to 1:7 for banks with a small traffic, i.e. the use of connection through the Service Bureau reduces exactly the biggest portion of the bank’s general costs.

 
The SWIFT client officer, registered with SWIFT. As regards the certificates issued by SWIFTPKI, each user can register in SWIFT at least two information security officers (Security Officers), whose responsibilities include the administration of orders to SWIFT for PKI certificates used by the institutions (also issued by SWIFT). The clients of the Service Bureau may avail of the Shared Security Officers option by delegating the management responsibility of SWIFT certificates of the SecurityOfficers institution to another SWIFT user.