Brussels-based Swift, the global provider of secure financial messaging services, has launched an enhanced solution for managing payment investigations that, it says, could save the financial industry millions and significantly reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve issues when international payments are delayed. 

Financial institutions, according to the organization that is owned by its members and overseen by the G10 central banks, spend more than US$1.6 billion each year on labour-intensive processes to investigate payments that get held up – regardless of technology or network used – and cause some of the largest global banks to incur more than US$20 million annually in fees and penalties. 

Swift’s enhanced, network agnostic capability – research by the organization suggests – has the potential to cut the industry’s operational and liquidity costs in this area by more than US$600 million per year, and reduce the time to resolve a case by up to 80%.

These benefits, the organization adds, could extend beyond payments on the Swift network to include any that leverage a unique end-to-end transaction reference ( UETR ), a standard that enables transparency on a payment’s status and location at any stage of its lifecycle.

The speed of cross-border payments has significantly improved in recent years, the organization notes – 90% of transactions over Swift, for example, reach end banks within an hour – and most are automatically processed. Delays typically arise when a payment instruction is missing key information, and it can typically take five to 10 working days for financial institutions to investigate and resolve these issues. 

Swift’s case management solution, it points out, standardizes the investigation process, leverages ISO 20022 data and the UETR standard to provide transparency and interoperability across networks. By capturing information centrally, the organization states, the solution eliminates the high number of manual touchpoints typically involved in an investigation between sending and receiving institutions.

Swift, it notes, is working to deliver instant and frictionless cross-border transactions, in line with the G20’s roadmap for an enhanced cross-border payments experience. More than 30 global financial institutions have trialled the enhanced product successfully, and it is now available to the entire global Swift community.

“Inefficient investigations processes are impacting the industry greatly in terms of cost and time and drastically affecting the customer experience,” says Shirish Wadivkar, Swift’s global head of transaction management. “Our enhanced solution addresses the main pain points in investigating incidents, helping our community make gains in efficiency, time and costs to provide the experience that customers expect.”