PONTON BLOG

PONTON X/P at SWIFT speed: 20 times more GB at a fraction of the cost

We recently completed version 5 of Ponton X/P at PONTON, a highly secure solution for B2B data exchange. However, instead of highlighting the throughput of over 250 AS4 messages per second, I would like to put into perspective the data ecosystem (“EDA”) implemented with our product for Austrian market communication, compared to SWIFT, the global network for interbank communication.

SWIFT sends and receives around 50 million messages on a typical business day. Each message consists of approximately 300 characters, meaning that roughly 15 GB of data is exchanged per day—consistently, year in, year out (slightly less on weekends).

Today, however, this volume pales in comparison to other sectors of the economy. As a provider of data exchange software like Ponton X/P, we are accustomed to entirely different scales. In the context of energy market communication, SWIFT appears almost modest:

Austrian electricity grid operators read load profile data from over 6 million smart meters and transmit it to suppliers and other market participants. On certain days, more than 6 million messages are exchanged (plus additional messages for communication logistics). Currently, these transmissions are performed monthly, but in the near future they will occur daily.

The data volume per transmission, however, far exceeds that of SWIFT:

  • The message header in the AS4 protocol is approximately 7 KB in size, as it encodes signatures, certificates, and additional metadata in XML—already about 23 times the size of a complete SWIFT message.
  • The message payload adds another 40–200 KB.

In total, AS4 messages therefore average well above:
6 million × 50 KB = 300 GB,
which is roughly 20 times the volume handled by SWIFT.

Figure: SWIFT message header vs. AS4 header shown at identical font size

Ponton X/P deals with significantly higher processing complexity

In addition, market communication requires a range of processing steps that go far beyond those in the financial sector:

  • Messages are encoded in XML, requiring XSD schema definitions to be loaded and used for validation
  • Messages are encrypted, compressed, and digitally signed (XML signature)
  • They are enriched with a complex AS4 header
  • Finally, they are secured again via transport/channel encryption before transmission

Overall, the processing effort for market communication is likely more than 500 times higher than for a 300-character SWIFT message.

The Key Question: What Does It Cost?

The total annual costs of SWIFT amount to approximately USD 1 billion. This includes administrative overhead, standardization efforts, governance structures, and more. However, it is reasonable to estimate that pure IT operating costs for data exchange alone are at least EUR 200 million.

And how much does the Austrian energy market communication network cost?

All in all, less than 1 percent of SWIFT’s IT costs.

Conclusion

In short, anyone deploying Ponton X/P can process several million AS4 messages per day—at costs that are barely noticeable compared to SWIFT.

With the recently released version 5 of Ponton X/P, we achieve:

  • 250 AS4 messages per second (including all processing steps mentioned above)
  • Nearly double that throughput when configured without AS4 overhead

This brings us close to SWIFT-level performance—at a completely different scale of data volume and cost efficiency.

Interested in learning more about Ponton X/P? Feel free to contact us at info@ponton.de.