SSFN – The New Gateway to Financial Center Infrastructure Is Live

Secure access to infrastructure services is essential for a smoothly functioning Swiss financial center. Data exchange among participants has to meet the very highest requirements regarding security and availability. The Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN) meets these standards in every respect. The closed network, which is independent from the internet, protects its users from cyber risks when exchanging data. Participants admitted to SSFN can thus communicate with one another and with the infrastructure services even more securely than they do now. This increases the resilience of the individual participants in particular and the Swiss financial system in general.

In addition, SSFN conceptually allows for uninterrupted communication. If a connection via a telecommunications provider is lost, another active connection is automatically selected, usually without any interruption to the application session.

Since the beginning of June 2022, SSFN has functioned flawlessly as an additional gateway to the SIC and euroSIC payment systems and to the ATM Monitoring Services of SIX (remote ATM monitoring). SIX will gradually connect additional infrastructure services to SSFN.

The network is based on the SCION technology developed at ETH Zurich, which makes it possible to control which parties may use the communication network and which path data take when being transmitted from sender to receiver. SSFN is being made available in close cooperation with the telecommunications providers Sunrise, Swisscom and SWITCH and the SCION software provider Anapaya Systems. So far, a dozen financial institutions and service bureaus have announced that they intend to use SSFN as a gateway to the infrastructure services in the future.