Sibos 2008 in Vienna — 15-19 September 2008

This panel explores the ways corporates and banks can work together to add value to traditional treasury and cash management services. One example is the standardisation of billing information for bank services. While this provides greater transparency for corporate customers, however, what's in it for the banks? Are corporate-to-bank trade services destined to be the next 'killer application'? Is SEPA driving corporates to adopt standardised bank channels and formats, or is the next big thing a universal, multi-bank digital identity?

Enabling richer relationships

How can the SWIFT platform be leveraged to extend value to corporate customers?

A morning panel on ‘Extending the value for corporates’ set out to explore the ways in which corporates and banks can work together to add value beyond traditional treasury and cash management services.

Introducing the session, moderator Richard Parkinson, Managing Director, Treasury Today, asked Dennis Sweeney, Deputy Treasurer, Treasury Services, GE Corporate Treasury to summarise his five-year experience as a corporate SWIFT user. The story, said Sweeney, was largely positive. Having taken the first steps in 2003, GE now connects to 65 banks using FIN and 16 through FileAct.

“There were, however, bumps in the road,” said Sweeney. Readiness among GE’s banks varied. “The large transaction banks with which we started the process were wellprepared,” said Sweeney. But a number of others had to be more or less dragged into the process. A particular hurdle was the lack of a standard legal agreement among the various banks. While the situation has improved significantly with the elaboration of a template by SWIFT, differences still persist.

Banks themselves have needed to revisit their own SWIFT processes. “We’ve had to reengineer our SWIFT infrastructures to meet the needs of how corporates want to interact with us over SWIFT,” said Gary Greenwald, Head of Information Services and Capabilities Architecture, Citi. Part of the issue, acknowledged Marilyn Spearing, Global Head of Trade Finance & Cash Management, Corporates, Deutsche Bank is that banks that are used to communicating with each other over SWIFT have developed ways of doing things between themselves ”that are not exactly what it says on the tin.”

For Fernando Lardies, Global Head of Cash Management, Santander the biggest challenge from the corporate perspective is with FileAct. FIN, he suggested, “is relatively straightforward to implement, but FileAct provides a bigger workload for corporates.”

The session went on to consider the supply chain, bank account management and Exceptions and Investigations as fruitful areas for corporates and banks to explore together on the SWIFT platform.

The Trade Services Utility (TSU), for example, is a utility, not a service, stressed Spearing. “It aims to facilitate communication. How banks embed it in their products is up to each of them.” However, trade services remains an area with significant fragmentation, according to Lardies, with numerous local solutions.

As for bank account management, Greenwald described it as “a very paper-laden, arthritic process.” The breakthrough, he suggested, would be when a legally binding digital signature is accepted in all situations and jurisdictions. Meanwhile, new ISO 20022 messages for bank account management are set for a first release end-2008 or early-2009. “Regulatory issues may present challenges in some markets, but we have to start somewhere,” said Greenwald.