(31 October 2022 – Belgium) Swift has partnered with vendor MonetaGo to launch a trade financing validation service for the messaging network's members.
MonetaGo’s Secure Financing system will enable financial institutions to check for duplications of documents, from invoices to bills of lading, warehouse receipts and purchase orders, before deciding to finance them. Digital fingerprints of these documents are created by using a hashing algorithm, and these fingerprints are registered in a global hash registry which acts as a secure unified repository.
If the same document is registered on the system by more than one lender, the system will flag all duplicates after the first unique instance is registered.
Following the successful completion of the pilot phase that saw the participation of 20 institutions across 4 continents, the service can now be accessed by all the institutions in the SWIFT network.
MonetaGo CEO, Neil Shonhard said, “Duplicate financing, through the reuse of the same documents with multiple lenders, is a hidden problem in trade finance. Many such frauds go undetected because financial institutions cannot check with each other if a transaction has been financed.
“There is now a global standardised system to check duplicate financing. Going further, the additional authentication services availed through the same system will provide greater assurance to lenders on the integrity of their financing transactions.”