More uptime availability and performance success for Safe4

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During January 2015 Safe4 maintained 100% availability of the service except for a short period  when our hosting partner applied a critical security patch to the infrastructure.  Since we take the security of our customers’ information very seriously it was felt that applying this patch was essential. The downtime was scheduled for overnight at a weekend, so it is hoped that it did not impact any of our users. Please accept our apologies if you were unable to access the service during this time.

Availability

We hope you are pleased with the performance you are seeing when using the system. In order to help target improvements Safe4 tracks the time taken to display pages in the system. Since there are a number of factors that can cause performance problems we have implemented an approach which measures the time it takes for you to be able to use a page. This is the most realistic measure we can find.

When developing Safe4 the team treat any page that takes longer than 2 seconds to load to be a defect. This is our performance target.

We are pleased to advise that during January the average (median) page load time experienced was 0.89 seconds. This is well under our target so it is hoped that we are meeting your performance expectations.

Performance

If we examine individual geographies we can see the impact of the internet on the performance.

  • Performance in the UK, where our data centre is based, is averaging out at 0.78 seconds.
  • Performance in South Africa is averaging out at 1.5 seconds, despite the extra network connections we are pleased to be getting great performance here.
  • The slowest average performance at 1.6 seconds seems to be for users in the United States where increased network delays seem to be adversely affecting performance.

Safe4 will continue to monitor performance and availability of the service to ensure that we meet the demands of your businesses. Look out for updates to these charts in the coming months.

Safe4 achieves Cyber Essentials accreditation

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Cyber Essentials Badge Medium (72dpi)

The Cyber Essentials accreditation scheme was implemented by the UK Government to establish criteria for the management of information in order to prevent intrusion from external attackers.  Accredited organisations are entitled to display the Cyber Essentials logo, which confirms that they have met the standards required.

Safe4 have received this accreditation, and we are now able to display the Cyber Essentials badge on our website and our secure cloud service.

This is part of an ongoing process to ensure that Safe4 remains one of the most secure sites on the internet.  It is accompanied by annual penetration testing, performed by licenced external laboratories, and constant surveillance of the ever-growing range of internet security threats.

The objective is to ensure that Safe4 customers’ data is protected to the highest standards available, and that our user community in the legal, financial, insurance, health and government sectors can trust their confidential information to Safe4.

For further information, please refer to the Contact page on our website.  We would appreciate an opportunity to speak with you.

Safe4 Information Management Limited

February 2015

EMFC enjoys the benefits of working with Safe4

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EMFC Logo - horizontal to light

 

Syndicated bank lending has become a highly significant means of providing loan capital, particularly in emerging markets. A syndicated loan is a means of sharing risk between lenders, and allows a degree of participation that reflects each lender’s view of the borrower and the nature of their requirement for funds. Since the 1970s, syndicated loans have been increasing their share of global capital markets, and today represent more than a third of all international financing.

The need for development capital is frequently greater in emerging economies, where access to established capital markets can be more difficult. Hence the need for specialised services in this arena, provided by organisations that have deep knowledge of the banking and financial services sector, and are also able to interpret the requirements of borrowers in emerging markets.

EMFC Loan Syndications LLP (“EMFC“) was established in 2012 with exactly this objective: to act on behalf of the borrower by becoming a key member of their internal finance team, and to lead the creation of a financial model and due diligence information that will support the raising of the right type of loan from the right type of lenders. EMFC will work closely with the borrower to gather all of the information needed to support the loan credit process, and follow through by project-managing the transaction, including involvement in the bank syndication activity.

In order to provide this service effectively, EMFC must first gather, and then share, large amounts of information. The nature of this information is very sensitive – hence the need for a highly secure platform to hold and manage all of the necessary documents while they are being prepared and made ready for submission to the lending banks. EMFC started working with Safe4 in 2013, having established that the unique data model offered by Safe4 provided an ideal means of controlling all of the data needed for the execution of the process. The comprehensive permissions and access controls available in Safe4 give all parties the ability to see just the information they need to perform their function. Full audit trails and extensive reporting facilities also allow Safe4 to be used as a legally-compliant system of record.

??????????Sophie Papasavva, founding partner of EMFC, has held senior banking positions with J P Morgan and Standard Bank of South Africa, and recognised the benefits that using a flexible and secure service such as Safe4 would bring. Sophie believes that “whilst there are specialist tools available to help manage the syndicated lending process, they are costly to use and somewhat rigid in their approach, and are not necessarily ideal for use among emerging market borrowers. EMFC needed a partner who would listen to our requirements and make sure that the service was fit for purpose in the lending and borrowing communities we serve. Safe4 have made changes to their system to support some of the very specific functional requirements that we identified, and now the system has proved to be a valuable tool for EMFC.”

Sophie believes that Safe4 has brought some very specific benefits for EMFC. She has summarised these by highlighting some significant points:

“Safe4 has brought us some valuable advantages in our highly specialised business. It gives us:

  • Highly confidential transactions support – very secure documentation management system
  • Information Memoranda and loan agreements are bulky documents – our focus on emerging markets often means banks have limited mailbox sizes – Safe4 never uses email to transfer documents, and therefore never clogs up any mailboxes
  • Ability to check and confirm invitees have actually accessed and downloaded the information
  • Multiple lenders invited – ability to ring-fence each, thus controlling the level of information disseminated even within a transaction
  • Speed and ease of access to all transaction documents by all parties
  • Adds to professionalism of the service EMFC offers as compared to exchange of documents over e-mail, which is now a very high-risk means of communication
  • Far more cost effective than other file management systems that try to do more (and remain underutilised and overpriced)

We hope to continue working with Safe4 to add value to our business, and to the borrowers and lenders for whom we work.”

Ben Martin, Director of Safe4, is delighted at the way the relationship with EMFC has developed. “Sophie showed great business insight in identifying the ability of Safe4 to support the complex and confidential transactions that EMFC helps to manage. Her input to the development of the system has been of real value to us, and we hope to be able to work closely with EMFC as they develop their growing reputation in today’s highly sophisticated financial services world.”

For more information on how Safe4 can help with the delivery and storage of highly confidential information, please refer to the Contacts Page on this website.  We will be very pleased to assist you.

Safe4 Information Management

February 2015