Swift has introduced an enhanced solution aimed at reducing the costs and delays associated with investigating cross-border payment issues.
This move that could save the financial industry hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Financial institutions currently spend over US$1.6 billion each year on processes to investigate delayed payments, often incurring significant fees and penalties.
According to Swift, its new Case Management service could lower operational and liquidity costs by more than US$600 million annually and cut resolution times by up to 80%.
The solution is designed to streamline investigations across network agnostic technologies and infrastructures by using ISO 20022 data and the unique end-to-end transaction reference (UETR) standard.
By providing greater transparency and eliminating many manual touchpoints by capturing information centrally, it aims to speed up the resolution of issues that typically take five to ten working days to address.
While 90% of cross-border transactions on the Swift network now reach end banks within an hour, delays can still occur when payment instructions are incomplete, and these labour-intensive investigations happen regardless of the network or technology used.
Swift’s new service seeks to address these cases more efficiently, with the potential for its benefits to extend beyond the Swift network.
The Case Management service is part of Swift’s broader effort to improve the speed and transparency of international payments, supporting the G20’s roadmap for enhancing cross-border transactions.
More than 30 global banks have participated in early trials of the solution, which is now available to Swift’s wider customer base.
Shirish Wadivkar, Global Head of Transaction Management, Swift said,
“Our enhanced solution addresses the main pain points in investigating incidents, helping our community make gains in efficiency, time, and costs to provide the experience that customers expect.
It’s not only a great example of how the ISO 20022 standard can help our industry deliver better user experience by removing friction and providing transparency, but is also a case in point as to how Swift is committed to interoperating an increasingly complex financial ecosystem by extending the benefits of our solutions across networks.”
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik
This article first appeared on Fintech News Singapore
