SWIFT has recently expanded its scope of services from payments to compliance, including the launch of its KYC Registry. More recently, it launched multiple initiatives to help banks better manage their data and monitor financial crime risks. Dubbed, Compliance Analytics, this business intelligence toolkit is designed to wrap value-added services around its core product.
Yawar Shah, Chairman, SWIFT, believes that SWIFT has been given “a strong mandate” from its 10,000 members to help them better comply with and proactively address financial crime.
And its been pretty busy over the last six months living up to that proposition and expanding beyond its core payments product offering to the compliance arena. The first initiative was the creation of a global Know Your Customer (KYC) Registry, which was created to help banks manage compliance challenges and reduce the high costs associated with implementing KYC-regulated regulations.
“Compliance with financial crime regulation is one of the major challenges that banks face globally, and customers have been asking us to provide industry-wide solutions to streamline their associated processes, cut cost and reduce risk,” said Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO, SWIFT, said. Leibbrandt believes that the KYC Registryleverages SIFT’s core strengths, including its track record of operational excellence.”
Then, in March, SWIFT acquired Omnicision, a provider of financial crime prevention services and solutions. That move enhanced SWIFT’s investment in its compliance offerings and expanded its Sanctions Testing Service, helping SWIFT’s customers identify and then respond to unusual patterns of activity, mashing up data from a variety of sources. SWIFT Compliance Analytics will help banks monitor and address financial crime risk. With this tool, banks will be able to analyze their own SWFIT traffic data to identify unusual patterns, different trends in traffic flows and behavior, hidden relationships and large amounts of activity in high-risk areas.
“There are increasingly high expectations for financial institutions to implement policies and tools that will help identify and prevent financial crime activities,” said, Luc Meurant, Head of Banking Markets and Compliance Services at SWIFT. “Compliance Analytics enables banks to analyze their existing SWIFT traffic data to detect spikes, outliers or possible policy breaches. This is a great new tool that can help alleviate some of the financial crime compliance challenges impacting the banking community”.
Compliance Analytics will give banks a single access to the standardized data and a complete overview of the SWIFT activity. This will empower banks to identify and assess areas of risk, validate the processes that are in place and have a more complete view of their SWIFT traffic. In addition, customers can use their data to benchmark themselves against their peers in the industry, set alerts and develop risk models.
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