Nordea Bank goes live with SWIFT

SWIFT`s Payments Data Quality services helps financial institutions comply with new requirements stemming from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) Recommendation 16.

The new FATF Recommendation 16 states that originator and beneficiary information must be included in wire transfers. Today, this information is missing or incomplete in a significant number of payments messages, posing potential compliance challenges for banks. In order to address these issues and help banks monitor their compliance with FATF16, the Payments Data Quality service checks messages after the fact using quality verification rules developed by SWIFT in line with industry practice and in cooperation with its global community. The new service also allows banks to consistently apply the agreed-upon set of verification rules based on FATF 16 guidelines, thus facilitating the development of industry standards globally.

The service highlights problem areas, identifies trends and provides the information compliance professionals need to conduct investigations within their payments systems and to take appropriate action, claims the company.  More than that, the service offers financial institutions: an overview of the quality of originator and beneficiary information in their payments messages; detailed analytics to help them identify potential risk related to specific countries, counterparties and branches; reporting from SWIFT as a neutral third party to support their internal investigations and discussions with their counterparties; a web-based platform eliminating the need to install, integrate or maintain additional systems.

The lack of standard practices for formatting some originator and beneficiary details in financial messages, such as addresses and bank account numbers, can make data detection by automated systems difficult.