Despite an overall trend towards trading on open account terms, traditional trade instruments remain a key component of a bank’s finance offering. SWIFT currently offers two sets of its traditional standards in the trade services area - standards for documentary collections and cash letters (MT 4xx) and standards for documentary credits and guarantees (MT 7xx).
Trade messaging has now been extended to cover corporate-to-bank message exchanges – Trade for Corporates. Two ways of exchanging corporate-to-bank trade data over SWIFT are now available: using FIN (MT 798), or FileAct (with formalised file labels - trade request types). The MT 798 is being used in the corporate-to-bank environment to cater for Import Letters of Credit, Export Letters of Credit and Guarantees/Standby Letters of Credit, based on the reuse of the fields of the existing MT 7xx bank-to-bank messages. In response to the needs of the SWIFT Trade community SWIFT has extended the offering to a total of 41 flows. These are now available.
SWIFT Partners play an essential role in the implementation of the MT 798 and the FileAct messaging service, both for banks and corporates. The label granted by SWIFT to a vendor’s certified banking application for Trade is SWIFTReady Trade Finance. The new label SWIFT for Corporates – Trade Finance, for corporate applications, was launched mid 2010 and already has two SWIFT Partners with labels.