Banks achieve cost and efficiency savings using SWIFT’s service for workers’ remittances

La Hulpe, 8 September 2009 — Compared to proprietary bilateral arrangements, a decrease of 80% in cost and a reduction from 6 to 2 months in time to set up a new counterpart are reported.

Earlier this year, a group of banks successfully tested SWIFT’s service for workers’ remittances designed to enable fast, efficient and cost-effective international person-to-person payments.

Financial institutions indeed see the workers’ remittances market as a rich source of new customers and revenue. Traditional correspondent banking arrangements, however, have not delivered the price and time transparency or ease of use that customers expect, while proprietary services are difficult to scale across multiple countries and counterparts.

SWIFT’s new service solves these problems by providing a framework onto which banks can develop their workers’ remittance service. The framework consists of contract templates, a market practice for service levels and product definitions, reference data services, ISO 20022 standards and a cost-effective messaging service.

Using SWIFT’s service, banks can now deliver a robust value proposition to their customers. The common market practice allows banks to provide cost and time transparency to customers. Contract templates, reference data and XML standards enable banks to use any payment product at both ends of the transaction in an efficient way, thus saving cost and reducing time to set up new counterparts. Finally, the service is commercially neutral, giving banks total flexibility in consumer branding, pricing and foreign exchange for these payments.

“SWIFT delivered an excellent set of tools to make the service easy to understand and use for both business and technical users in financial institutions,” comments Arthur Cousins, Standard Bank of South Africa who led an advisory group that defined the service requirements.

“Banks will find this service attractive as it provides a cost-efficient framework between banks while allowing innovation and competition in the retail space,” adds Luc Meurant, Head of Banking Markets at SWIFT.

The new service will be showcased at Sibos in Hong Kong on 16 September, 2009.

Note to Editors:

About SWIFT
SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative that provides the communications platform, products and services to connect over 8,500 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in more than 200 countries. SWIFT enables its users to exchange automated, standardised financial information securely and reliably, thereby lowering costs, reducing operational risk and eliminating operational inefficiencies. SWIFT also brings the financial community together to work collaboratively to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest.

For further information, please contact euan.sellar@swift.com.