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Exceeding 7 billion message mark, just one of the highlights of a successful 2017 at Swift

Exceeding 7 billion message mark, just one of the highlights of a successful 2017 at Swift

Company Information,
29 January 2018 | 5 min read

Swift’s FIN traffic rose to an all-time high of 7.1 billion messages in 2017, fuelled by double-digit growth in global payments

Traffic growth

Swift’s FIN traffic rose to an all-time high of 7.1 billion messages in 2017, fuelled by double-digit growth in global payments. While Swift’s FIN traffic grew by 9% over the year, FIN Payment traffic rose by 12%, driven by growth across all regions and the adoption of Swift’s gpi service.

With an average of 28.14 million messages a day Swift also recorded new peak traffic days in 2017, processing 32.84 million FIN messages on 30th November – 8% above the 2016 peak of 30.4 million messages. At the same time, Swift continued to deliver on its day-to-day mandate: operational availability performance during 2017 exceeded targets. Swift achieved 99.999% availability both for FIN and its SwiftNet messaging services, against the backdrop of growing volumes and the completion of the FIN Renewal project – as well as the roll out of new products and services and the ongoing implementation of the Customer Security Programme.

“Traffic growth, and payments traffic growth in particular, was exceptionally strong in 2017, reflecting the Community’s trust in the cooperative and the wider growth in the global economy”, said Swift CEO, Gottfried Leibbrandt. “Swift maintained the high security and reliability performance our community expects, while investing for the future, developing innovative new services, working to help the community reinforce its security through the Customer Security Programme, and continuing to return the benefits of its economies of scale to users.”

Traffic growth, and payments traffic growth in particular, was exceptionally strong in 2017, reflecting the Community’s trust in the cooperative and the wider growth in the global economy.

Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO, Swift

Growth in Swift’s payments traffic was strong across all regions as well as in domestic and cross-border segments, both of which experienced double-digit growth during the year. Momentum was partially driven by the go-live of Swift’s gpi service in January 2017, which already accounts for nearly 10% of cross border payment instructions carried on the network. A total of 100 country corridors are already live with gpi, including all the major country corridors such as the US-China route, where gpi payments already account for 25% of traffic. End-users are already seeing the significant impact of gpi: all gpi payments can be tracked end-to-end and most of them are already credited in a few hours or less.

“The success of gpi in 2017 exceeded expectations”, said Swift’s Chief Marketing Officer, Luc Meurant, “With more banks going live, additional banks signing up to the service, and fast-growing demand from corporates, volumes will continue to rise dramatically. Offering speed, transparency and safety, we expect gpi will become the new norm within the next two to three years. Swift has led the way in innovation, to provide our customers with an enhanced level of performance, and will continue to be at the forefront of introducing new technological solutions. The gpi service, combined with our Financial Crime Compliance suite and the Customer Security Programme, will transform international payments.”

Swift has led the way in innovation, to provide our customers with an enhanced level of performance, and will continue to be at the forefront of introducing new technological solutions.

Luc Meurant, Chief Marketing Officer, Swift

Further 2017 Milestones

Securities

Growth in Securities activity, which now accounts for more than 50% of traffic, was strong in 2017. While Securities volumes on FIN increased by 7.7%, InterAct traffic rose by more than 86%.This traffic growth was largely driven by the migration of Central Securities Depositories (CSDs) and their communities’ connectivity to Target2 Securities (T2S), via the new Value Added Network (VAN) solution. With the addition of the final wave, the Swift VAN is now carrying live traffic for more than 150 users (CSDs, Central Banks and Directly Connected Participants).

Customer Security Programme

Swift continued the rollout of its Customer Security Programme in 2017, raising awareness on market practice in handling counterparty relationships, publishing a directory of cyber security service providers, launching the Swift Information Sharing and Analysis Centre’ (Swift ISAC), further hardening our interfaces, and developing a Customer Security Control Policy and Framework. To assist customers in readying themselves to self-attest against the new framework, Swift launched its largest-ever customer campaign, running 238 work sessions for 14,565 attendees around the world. By December 31st 2017, just 8 months after the introduction of Swift’s Customer Security Controls Framework, 89% of all Swift customers, representing 99% of all FIN messages, had attested their level of compliance with the mandatory security controls.

Financial Crime Compliance

In the Financial Crime Compliance area, Swift’s initial compliance service – Sanctions Screening – surpassed 800 customers, while we complemented our Name screening solution by adding batch screening of databases, to provide a range of screening tools that support sanctions compliance and customer due diligence. We also launched Daily Validation Reports, a key fraud risk mitigation tool for customers, and The KYC Registry, which was opened to all supervised financial institutions in July 2017, had exceeded 4,500 customer institutions by year end.

Market Infrastructures and Real Time Payments

Swift continued to support more than 200 market infrastructures and their participants around the world. We particularly focused on facilitating the move to Instant Payments in Europe, Hong Kong and the US.  Swift also went live went with the messaging infrastructure supporting Australia’s new payments platform, NPPA, which soon opens to the public.

Pricing

In Swift2020, Swift’s strategic five year plan, the cooperative committed to a new long-term, structural price reduction programme. In 2017 Swift made measurable progress in delivering on that commitment, reducing average message prices by 12% year-on-year. This resulted in an overall 20% price reduction just two years into the 5-year programme.

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