(22 May 2024 – Belgium) Swift has unveiled a new feature for financial institutions (Fis) to streamline cross border payments for corporate clients.
Swift is enabling FIs to capture rich data at its source by standardising payments end-to-end with ISO 20022, extending their capability across the entire payment chain and giving banks ready-to-use, white-labelled tracking services that can be activated for customers “at the click of a button” Swift reported in a release.
The group will also support banks to offer customers payment tracking services by application programming interface (API) messaging channel, for complete transparency on the status of a payment and payment receipt confirmation.
“Adoption of ISO 20022 provides a unique opportunity to improve cross-border payments. Capturing rich data at source will enhance the entire ecosystem, driving us closer to our goals of instant and frictionless transactions. We’re delighted to be making it easy for our community to extend the benefits to their customers while simplifying and standardising access to services, such as tracking, which are so important to efficient corporate treasury. Many members of Swift’s working group are implementing and piloting the new capabilities, and Swift intends to extend them to its wider community later this year” stated Swift Chief Strategy Officer, Thierry Chilosi.
“Currently, corporate payments are complicated by competing standards and proprietary formats, while multi-banked corporates face a fragmented landscape as they interact with a multitude of banking providers with varying features and services. The goal is to introduce a universal standard that can maximise the benefit of ISO 20022’s richer, more structured data, facilitating automation and reconciliation and drastically reducing integration costs”
Global pharmaceutical company Roche has successfully implemented Swift’s new corporate API channel, with a key banking partner enabling their direct access to tracking information for payments they send and receive.
“Having direct API access to Swift’s payment tracking system will provide us with more transparency and strengthen our ability to analyse overall payment performance. It will allow us to refine our instructions, better identify inefficiencies, and minimise erosion of value in cross-border payments” commented InHouse Bank at Roche Global Head, Stefan Windisch.