Correspondent Monitoring

Who will find Correspondent Monitoring most useful?

Correspondent Monitoring has been designed primarily for large clearers that are active as originators, beneficiaries or intermediaries in correspondent banking flows and who are required to monitor correspondent banking activities for compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter Terrorism Financing (CFT) regulations. 

Where does Correspondent Monitoring fit into Swift’s compliance services portfolio?

Correspondent Monitoring is an optional extension of the Compliance Analytics product family within our Financial Crime Compliance portfolio.

How do Compliance Analytics and Correspondent Monitoring complement each other?

Compliance Analytics is a reporting tool. It provides responses to such questions as your exposure to a specific counterparty group, country, activity share on a high-risk corridor, or nesting originating in a particular high-risk jurisdiction. Compliance Analytics also lets you drill down into a particular affiliate’s flows. In other words, the end-user pulls information from the Compliance Analytics application.

By contrast, Correspondent Monitoring provides a monitoring capability. It automatically monitors your Swift payments and alerts you to unusual payment patterns that merit investigation as part of your ongoing AML/CFT operational processes. Correspondent Monitoring pushes information to you, based on settings tuned to your institution’s policies and risk appetite.

Why is Correspondent Monitoring an improvement over existing correspondent banking AML and CFT tools?

Many AML systems are designed for retail banking and take a bottom-up approach by aggregating individual payment movements in and out of correspondent accounts. Correspondent banking is more complex, which is why, at the request of the community, we’ve developed Correspondent Monitoring to provide a global, top-down view on payment chains and correspondent relationships.

Which message types will be covered in the reports?

Correspondent Monitoring will initially cover aggregate details of MT 103, MT 202 and MT 205 messages, including the subtypes MT 202COV and MT 205COV as these are the most relevant payment types for correspondent banking AML and CFT compliance activities. Swift will continue to evolve the service in line with customer needs.