The pandemic had previously put a break on impending SWIFT Releases that were originally pencilled in for 2020. When those were pushed back to November 2021, that was a welcome deferment to allow financial institutions to ready themselves for the upcoming changes to Trade Finance Category 7 for Guarantees and Standby Letters of Credit.
As a host of industry initiatives, innovative technologies and new digital forms of currency emerge, payments are rapidly evolving—with multiple routes emerging that each look likely to lead to a payment destination that is instant, 24/7/365 and fully transparent. With banks seeking to navigate this changing landscape, how is this payment destination being secured? Not with a one-size-fits-all remedy, but through a combination of developing technologies and solutions.
Rapid leaps forward in cross-border payments have led to significant reductions in processing times. This is great for customers but also leaves windows of opportunity open for cybercriminals, such as money launderers and fraudsters. The responsibility to remain compliant with financial-crime regulations weighs heavily on banks as it becomes more complicated, but the SWIFT network is going all out to help in the effort to ensure swift but legal transactions.
2020 has proved to be an eventful year for ISO 20022, with SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) and other major market infrastructures opting to postpone the implementation of the new standard. Any assumptions that these delays will provide participants with a respite are unfounded; testing times still lie ahead, and internal project work should reflect this.
ISO 20022, the ISO standard for the interchange of electronic data between financial institutions, has arrived and is shaking up the payment sector worldwide. Migrating to the new system is voluntary, but the advantages of lower cost, greater fraud protection, increased customer satisfaction are quickly winning over banks and businesses alike, making its blanket adoption inevitable. What do bank managers need to do to prepare for this payment-processing overhaul?
SWIFT has a long history of enabling financial institutions to communicate with each other reliably and securely; thousands of banks use the SWIFT network for interbank messaging. Faced with the twin threats of intensifying cybercrime and growing compliance requirements, banks are scrambling to be secure and compliant while also profitable. SWIFT has developed robust financial-crime solutions that assist its members to comply with the gamut of regulations—from AML to KYC—profitably.
The details matter when it comes to sensitive banking data, especially relating to payments. Regulators are clamping down on banks in response to the threats posed by ever-increasing criminal and terrorist activities and are requiring specific information about not only the sender but also the recipient of a payment; fortunately solutions exist in the form of MT structured message formats.
It’s not news that the innovation sweeping most of the financial world has been slow to meet up with the realm of international trade finance. That’s why the world’s premier international-payments network, SWIFT, has joined forces with various financial institutions and utilities to make cross-border payments a whole lot faster as well as more efficient, transparent and traceable.
SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the grease that keeps the wheels of the worldwide economy moving. Some 25 million messages – most of them money transfers – pass through the SWIFT system daily.
In the aftermath of the United States 2016 presidential election, there has been much debate over whether Russian hackers interfered with the electoral process in order to help secure a victory for Donald Trump. Around the same time, however, it was revealed that Russia was the victim of cyberattacks of its own.