The Secured Transfer of Electronic Financial Information (STEFI) is intended to complement the IFS family.
The IFS is a complete system integrating all the functionalities for processing and transmitting international electronic money orders, including accounting and settlement procedures as defined in the UPU agreements.
However, many Posts are already equipped with an electronic system for money orders processing. Others are not, but prefer to purchase an integrated counter system for processing all postal products. These two categories of Posts are looking for an access point to the IFS network but the present IFS application can be seen as too heavy and sometimes too complex.
Considering this situation, the PTC has developed a system called STEFI (Secured Transfer of Electronic Financial Information). STEFI offers an alternative way of accessing the postal network and is ‘lighter’ than IFS in terms of hardware requirements.
STEFI delivers acknowledgement of receipt of each message received correctly and enables users to edit reports for periodic control.
It also checks the information validity (transmitted and received) according to a number of criteria.
STEFI is effective for Posts with or without a good IT system:
When a good IT system is in place, and money orders can be processed electronically from end-to-end inside the country, it is best to have a gateway solution such as STEFI and simply interface with it.
When IT systems do not exist, volumes are very low and the costs of deploying and maintaining a complex system are prohibitive, STEFI is a good entry point to a computerized solution.
STEFI is also easy and fast to administer. A site survey is not always necessary and the installation and training can be done in two or three days.
