The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) has created a service to help financial institutions comply with requirements governing payments messaging.
The service, called Payments Data Quality, will cover Financial Action Task Force’s Recommendation 16 for wire transfers. The rule, which created new requirements for originator and beneficiary information in payments messages, has or will become law in many countries including the European Union member states and Singapore.
Swift plans to release the service in the third quarter of 2016. The service will provide financial institutions with an overview of the quality of originator and beneficiary information and analytics to identify the risk presented by specific countries, counterparties and branches. Swift will also serve as a neutral third party providing reporting for internal investigations and counterparty discussions.
“Ensuring that complete originator and beneficiary information is contained within relevant payment messages helps financial institutions comply with their regulatory obligations,” Brigitte DeWilde, Swift's head of anti-money laundering and sanctions initiatives, said in a news release. “However this information is sometimes missing, unstructured and incomplete, complicating its detection.”
The service also includes a web-based platform that eliminates the need for the installation, integration or maintenance of additional systems.
