Open Banking

SWIFT Announces New Strategy to Enhance Its Processing Platform

SWIFT announced that over the next 2 years and beyond, it will continually enhance its payments and securities platform as part of a new strategy approved by its Board.

The 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.

In payments, financial institutions will be able to expand offerings to businesses and consumers and provide better 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.

This new approach will support innovation, independently or in collaboration with fintechs — to create new value-added services to support their business growth.

SWIFT’s enhanced platform will orchestrate interactions between financial institutions and other participants, aiming to minimise friction, optimise speed and provide end-to-end transparency and predictability.

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.

Javier Pérez-Tasso, CEO of SWIFT, said:

Javier Pérez-Tasso

“We are innovating the underlying infrastructure that financial institutions use to make transactions run even faster end-to-end, and at the same time further reducing costs for the community through industry-shared services in the areas of cyber, fraud and compliance.

We will introduce data innovation that embeds risk and control elements expected from SWIFT, creating peace of mind for business-critical operations. Combining these elements, we are creating a broad platform with faster technology and smarter and better services that the industry can trust as a foundation for innovation towards their own end-clients.”

The planned platform capabilities build on SWIFT’s recent initiatives, including SWIFT gpi and will be underpinned by its continued investment in cybersecurity and risk management.