Corporates: frequently asked questions, answered

As part of our strategy for enabling instant and frictionless transactions, we are committed to helping financial institutions enhance the corporate payment experience while delivering value to the banking community. To support this, we have introduced the first wave of new capabilities designed to improve customer experience and increase payment transparency for corporates.

We’re enabling corporates and banks to exchange rich and structured data and ensure it is carried end-to-end, making this data readily available across the payment chain. At the same time, Swift aims to help banks to achieve an overall uplift in service to respond to corporates’ needs while alleviating resource constraints and enabling easier adoption.

This presents tremendous opportunities for banks to integrate Swift-based services, accelerate innovation and implement differentiating solutions in their own channels; for corporates to access richer products and better services; and for the community to realise the full potential of ISO 20022, end to end.

As rich standardised data can now be captured straight from the source, SCORE banks can utilise the new and enhanced product capabilities which Swift offers as a basis for product development and innovation. They can also incorporate their own offerings and provide more value-added services  to their corporate customers that are connected on Swift.

Banks can offer integrated Swift services in their own propriety channels to corporates that are not connected to Swift, retaining full control of the commercial relationship. As the related Swift service will be standardised and ready to implement, this will improve delivery time to market.

SCORE is evolving by introducing the ability to exchange standardised ISO 20022 payments and reporting messages. This single standard in ISO 20022 enables the seamless transfer of data in the payment flow, end-to-end. With high-quality data captured at origination, validated on the network, and carried unaltered throughout the payment chain, this can bring significant benefits to treasury such as reducing payments friction, improving reconciliation, and enhancing the accuracy of cash flow forecasting.

In addition, Swift is making it easier for corporates to adopt and implement Swift’s ready-made services and provide them with a standardised experience. By streamlining the implementation and standardising the consumption model, corporates can access the service using the same channel and format across different banks. With a single integration, it also reduces the implementation effort. This model is used to offer Swift ready-made services such as payment tracking.

Swift’s strategy is to drive an instant and frictionless transaction experience end-to-end. Supporting the corporate business of banks is a core element, including both corporates that are connected to Swift and those who are not.

Banks can leverage Swift ISO 20022 standards in their proprietary channels from day one. This includes the use of best practices for structured data. We continue to make developments and improvements to stop fraudulent and erroneous payments, to further enhance efficiency through automation, and to improve customer experience.

In addition, we have an established portfolio of products and services that help corporates and treasury professionals streamline operations in numerous ways. You can find more information about all of these at Swift.com.

Banks can now deploy and control the Swift experience, like Tracking for Corporates, towards their corporate clients through a dedicated configuration portal. The portal allows banks to manage, activate and deactivate services. When a service is activated and configured for a specific corporate, the corporate can then access the service directly from Swift, for example through APIs. For Tracking for Corporates, banks can also continue to implement the GPI for Corporates service locally to integrate tracking into their existing customer channels (for example a web portal).

Thanks to our new Swift API and messaging channel financial institutions are now able to deliver a better payments experience to corporate clients by offering bespoke, ready-made services easily.  This, in turn, allows corporates to use Swift to connect to each of their banks through a single service.

Only banks can access the configuration portal. The portal is hosted within the Tracker, therefore the access management for the Tracker GUI applies. Users of the Tracker GUI can configure and activate corporates provided they have the correct RBAC role for the relevant bank’s BIC.

Corporates can make requests to their various banks to access these services. Banks can then manage which services are exposed to their customers and configure the granularity of the service when applicable.

For example, to activate Inbound Tracking for a specific corporate, the bank can use the configuration portal and configure which communication channels the corporate can use to receive the notifications, as well as decide which of the optional data should be present in the notifications.

By enabling services, like Tracking for Corporates, through the configuration portal, Swift provides a platform to offer services in a standardised way to ensure a harmonised experience for corporate customers across multiple banks using one channel. Banks that build services locally through traditional standalone implementations can also benefit from the configuration portal for specific customers in regions where the local implementation is not available. It offers a short time-to-market and the possibility of customising its offering with bank-specific added-value services.

Swift continues working with financial institutions to allow them to offer additional ready-made services to their corporate clients. Building on the tracking service, the next area of focus will be on self-service capabilities for Stop & Recall, as well as exploring improvements such as simplifying payment initiation through payment preparation capabilities. The roadmap will be communicated during our community webinars. To stay in the know, make sure your operational contacts are up to date and that you have updated your commercial communications preferences in the Swift Preference Centre.

Already live, this service gives banks the ability to provide tracking for inbound and outbound payments around the world, without the need for a time-consuming implementation process.  This service allows corporate clients complete visibility over the status of their payments quickly and easily, as well as receiving confirmation when payments have been received.

This is an advancement that allows corporate treasurers to precisely forecast their cash flow and liquidity positions, with far simpler reconciliation which is enabled by a unique end-to-end reference (UETR) and payment remittance information.

There is no technical implementation to get started.

GPI is the service banks use to track payments and provide status updates as per the GPI Service Level Agreement. The tracking notifications provide interbank statuses for each payment leg, dedicated payment statuses for banks, and only tracks outgoing payments.

Tracking for Corporates, also known as GPI for Corporates (G4C), provides dedicated payment statuses for corporates for both outgoing and incoming payments.  Find out more in the Knowledge Centre.

Transaction Manager orchestrates payments on the Swift network by guaranteeing that complete rich data is protected and shared end to end. It is directly embedded into our messaging systems meaning that you benefit from it for all your in-scope transactions. You do not need to opt-in to benefit from Transaction Manager.

Tracking for Corporates is a value-added service customers can subscribe to, which provides tracking status information about where the payment is in its lifecycle, with transparency details.

Corporates that are configured by their bank to track payments directly can consume the tracker data either via API or through status notification messages sent to them via FINplus. They can then leverage a single implementation to process the tracking data across multiple banks. The Corporates Working Group participants are exploring the feasibility of having a tracker GUI from Swift directly in case a corporate’s TMS/ERP system is not yet able to display the content on their local GUI.

Refer to our Knowledge Centre tip

We work closely with the Corporates Working Group, a group of globally representative corporates and cash management banks, to ascertain business requirements for our product design, roadmap and prioritization.  Corporate’s ERP/TMS, or service bureau complementors, are closely involved as well to facilitate the implementation and ensure standards are embedded into their applications.

As and when products and services are built, you can join us at webinars to learn about them before the official launch. You should reach out to your account manager if you have additional questions and/or want to discuss further.

Check out our factsheets on ISO 20022 and Tracking here

We have held webinars called ‘How our partners can harness our evolving cash management capabilities for corporates’, for our partners and will continue to communicate with them bilaterally as well as through future webinars and other channels. You can find the webinars within the ‘SCORE is evolving’ curriculum on SwiftSmart. We will also enable partners testing on ITB and TSP to make sure they are fully ready and in the best position to support banks and corporates.