SWIFT has revealed its new strategic vision to support the payments business of financial institutions through instant and frictionless transactions.
It suggested that the new move will transform payments and securities processing and retool cross-border infrastructure.
The cooperative will expand beyond financial messaging to provide comprehensive transaction management services.
SWIFT explained that securities financial institutions will benefit from improved reconciliation, reporting and asset servicing processes as well as end-to-end visibility of transactions to reduce settlement fails and fines.
During a panel at this year’s Sibos event, Mark Buitenhek, head of transaction services at ING, said the new infrastructure will provide greater predictability, transparency and at a lower cost.
Buitenhek explained that payments are important, especially in the current environment.
He said: “In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen digitisation grow and technology is everywhere, enabling us to do much better things than we used to.”
“Elsewhere, new entrants are knocking at our doors and that means that we have to prepare ourselves for the future. This is where SWIFT‘s payments strategy comes in.”
SWIFT suggested that the clients will be the biggest winners because financial institutions will be able to provide them with more and better payments services.
The digital platform will use application programming interfaces (APIs) and cloud technology to provide a set of common processing services that banks have historically invested in individually, saving the industry time and money.
In addition, new and extensive data capabilities will enable the pre-validation of essential data, fraud detection, data analytics, transaction tracking and exception case management.
Also on the panel, David Watson, chief strategy officer at SWIFT, said: “Our new strategy is to build on the solid foundation that we have today, the core of the messaging franchise that we have, the foundational link that we are between hundred of markets across the world and thousands of members of our community as well as their end clients.”
He added: “It will help financial institutions adapt, thrive and grow. It means customers and partners can focus on their own innovations.”
Industry participants also supported SWIFT’s vision. Michael Bellacosa, global head of payments and transaction services, BNY Mellon, suggested that customer behaviour has changed significantly in recent years.
He stated: “Our ongoing collaboration with SWIFT is an instrumental part of bringing the latest payments solutions to our customers both now and in the future.”
Elsewhere, Manish Kohli, global head of payments and receivables, Citi, noted: “With its new platform strategy, SWIFT is evolving from just making incremental improvements to its traditional store and forward messaging capabilities and towards truly transformative change based on API dynamic connectivity, a vastly improved data model and extremely relevant ‘payment orchestration’ services.”
Kohli said that the new platform builds on the progress of gpi, and moves towards “the desired end-state of payment ubiquity with the ability to make frictionless and instant cross border payments across the SWIFT network”.
Stefan Hoops, managing director, head of corporate bank at Deutsche Bank, added: “We plan to connect SWIFT’s cooperative industry-wide solution with our own products and client services that manage payments for all types of financial institutions, corporates and fintechs.”
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