Since 3 November 2017 the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has put into operation an upgraded generation of the state electronic interbank settlements system - the NBU System of Electronic Payments (hereinafter - SEP).
The new third generation of SEP (hereinafter SEP-3) was successfully commissioned causing no interruptions to banks’ ability to service their clients. During a business day on 3 November 2017, some 1.22 million payments worth a total of UAH 79.7 billion were processed via SEP-3.
“The implementation of the SEP-3 is one of the components of the NBU Information Security Strategic Development Program aimed at developing and improving services and IT infrastructure to enable execution of internal tasks by the NBU, but also and primarily to ensure the provision of services to the banking community that are within the realm of the NBU,” said Volodymyr Nagorniuk, the director of the IT Department at the NBU.
He has highlighted that the new SEP-3 features substantial update based on advanced information technologies. The SEP architecture was redesigned to embrace the runtime environment of the IBM WebSphere Application servers, JEE industrial standards and a new NBU transport system based on WebSphere MQ.
Key features areː
- enhanced performance ensured through horizontal and vertical scaling;
- modern industrial solutions for backup and restore procedure;
- high fault tolerance and failure resistance using the virtual environment and cloud technologies of the NBU;
- high level of security;
- data and code integrity;
- supporting transactionality at the application server level;
“This has allowed us to fundamentally enhance performance, efficiency and reliability of SEP functioning being the basis for further improvement, namely, the implementation of international standards for the exchange of financial messages and the introduction of innovative instruments for cashless transfers, said Volodymyr Nagorniuk.
For reference.
SEP is a systemically important payment system in Ukraine which caters for the needs of the national banking system in carrying out interbank hryvnia transfers with steady operational efficiency for over 20 years.
As of 1 October 2017, SEP participants included 187 institutions, of which 93 Ukrainian banks, 66 branches of the Ukrainian banks, 27 agencies of the State Treasury Service of Ukraine, and the National Bank of Ukraine.