SWIFT today announces that over the next two years and beyond it will fundamentally transform payments and securities processing, retooling cross-border infrastructure as part of a new strategy approved by its Board to enable the world’s financial institutions to deliver instant and frictionless end-to-end transactions.
The cooperative will expand beyond financial messaging to provide comprehensive transaction management services. This new approach will support and accelerate innovation, paving the way for financial institutions — independently or in collaboration with fintechs — to create new value-added services to support their business growth.
In payments, financial institutions will be able to expand offerings to businesses and consumers and enhance the end-customer experience. In 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.
SWIFT’s enhanced platform will orchestrate interactions between financial institutions and other participants to minimise friction, optimise speed and provide end-to-end transparency and predictability from one account to another anywhere in the world. This move has the potential to power instant and frictionless transactions between at least 4 billion accounts serviced by financial institutions across the SWIFT network.
The next-generation digital platform will use 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. New and extensive data capabilities will enable the pre-validation of essential data, fraud detection, data analytics, transaction tracking and exception case management.
The planned platform capabilities build on SWIFT’s recent successful transformation initiatives, including SWIFT gpi, the benchmark in cross-border payments messaging, and leverage the cooperative’s unrivalled reach across more than 11,000 institutions in 200 countries and territories. They will be underpinned by SWIFT’s continued investment in cybersecurity and risk management to ensure resilient and secure transactions. Users will benefit from the capabilities with minimal disruption through backward compatibility.
The new strategy already has received widespread support from across the financial services industry.
