SWIFT has announced the development of SWIFT Profile, a reporting tool that provides institutions with a global overview of their correspondent banking activities, and the opportunity to share this data at their discretion.
The service is the first part of SWIFT’s ‘know your customer’ (KYC) offering, which is designed to address the increasingly abundant challenges facing banks.
“Industry leaders and regulators alike have highlighted the importance of knowing your customer’s customer,” said Luc Meurant, head of banking markets and compliance services at SWIFT.
“The SWIFT Profile will enable banks to better assess their counterparties’ own declared behaviour and gain insights into potential risks posed by the activities of their counterparties and those institutions’ customers. Likewise, it will also help banks provide more transparency to their correspondent banking service providers.”
SWIFT Profile will use traffic data to pinpoint areas of potential risk within specific jurisdictions and can help support due diligence activities.
It can also provide independent overviews of direct and nested correspondent activities, and acts as a business enabler for institutions to deliver transparency on correspondent banking. Institutions will be able to create a SWIFT Profile to share with counterparties also using the KYC registry, while monitoring the information they choose disclose.
This is the first in a series of KYC and due diligence services that SWIFT plans to introduce once the KYC register becomes available to the public in January. It has developed both the registry and SWIFT Profile in collaboration with 12 global banks including Barclays, HSBC and Standard Chartered.
David Fleet, managing director of customer due diligence and middle office at Standard Chartered bank, said:
“By providing a global summary of an institution’s SWIFT traffic activities, the SWIFT Profile can help banks to focus their due diligence efforts and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their KYC assessments.”
SWIFT has also announced that banks that contribute their own data will be granted access to the registry free of charge in 2015.
