World First achieves significant operational efficiencies with SMA Financial’s SWIFT Bureau Service

FX broker copes with 400% increase in payments and gears up for exponential growth

LONDON, 22 April 2009 – SMA Financial (www.sma.co.uk), SWIFT Regional partner for UK, Eire and Channel Islands today announced that World First (www.worldfirst.com), the UK’s fastest growing foreign exchange broker, has achieved significant operational efficiencies with SMA Financial’s SWIFT Bureau Service. A joint project involving the broker’s main banking partner Barclays Commercial Bank and SMA delivered a highly efficient automated payments processing environment.

Jabu Henson, Chief Operating Officer at World First explained, “We are about to launch an online trading platform that will provide an easy to use, safe and secure foreign exchange service to our clients. Payment volumes have soared 400% in just two years with exponential growth forecasted for the future. The SWIFT capabilities through SMA and Barclays Commercial Bank will allow us to offer a fully automated end-to-end solution i.e. straight through processing (STP) from a client initiated transaction to our back office, and then on to payment instruction and confirmation.”

Barclays Commercial Bank recommended SMA’s Bureau Service as its preferred option for outsourced SWIFT connectivity. World First also conducted a market evaluation as Henson comments, “SMA could demonstrate a competitive bureau solution that was proven in action at similar companies. Barclays merely confirmed our analysis that the SMA Bureau Service best met our needs.”

World First has a skilled IT team and once SMA confirmed the data and integration requirements, the changes were rapidly made to the back office system. The broker now sends and receives MT101, MT103 and MT195 messages. The latter has given the broker the ability to raise investigation cases more rapidly, has led to a faster resolution of exception items and thus lowering of operational risk.

Henson concluded, “We set out to create a lean back office with high levels of operational efficiency. Thanks to the hard work of our IT team along with the professionals from SMA and Barclays Commercial Bank we now have a high degree of payments automation and STP. Additionally the infrastructure is in place to benefit from SWIFT messaging standards and this means we can manage our future payments growth.”

Simon Murby, Managing Director, SMA Financial said, “Working with Barclays Commercial Bank, we have been able to leverage the knowledge gained from many installations of our SWIFT Bureau Service to deliver trouble free SWIFT connectivity projects. By drawing upon SMA’s fully accredited team of SWIFT consultants, World First has been able to supplement its own IT resources to achieve excellent operational results.”

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About SMA Financial

Founded in 1995, SMA Financial has established its leadership as a source of specialist knowledge and expertise in the financial services industry providing SWIFT services, product and support. SMA Financial is the SWIFT Regional Partner for UK, Ireland and Channel Islands. It is the most extensively SWIFT accredited partner with over 300 successful implementations with banks, corporates and other financial institutions including more than 100 active SWIFT Service Bureau users. The company provides SWIFT Service Bureau, AML and SystemCare solutions as well as experienced consultancy services. For further information please visit www.sma.co.uk

About World First

World First is the UK’s fastest growing foreign exchange broker, offering private individuals and companies the ability to achieve significantly better foreign currency exchange rates and exceptional service. Based in London, World First has worked with over 17,000 private clients and 3,500 companies to date. World First’s foreign exchange transaction volume was over £1 billion last year (2008) and it is the first broker FSA authorised to offer foreign exchange hedging strategies. For further information please

visit www.worldfirst.com.

About Barclays Commercial Bank

Barclays Commercial Bank provides relationship banking to 81,000 larger and medium business customers in the UK (£1m to £1bn turnover). Customers are served by a network of relationship and industry sector specialist managers who provide local access to an extensive range of products and services, as well as offering business information and support.

Customers are also offered access to the products and expertise of other businesses in the Group, particularly Barclays Capital and Barclaycard. Barclays Asset and Sales Finance – a specialist business within Barclays Commercial Bank – provides customers with asset financing and leasing solutions.

For further information about Barclays, please visit our website http://www.barclays.co.uk/commercial

Press contact: Jenny Swift, Rivercalm: Tel: +44 207 152 6118 Email: swift {at} rivercalm(.)com