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Central Bank of Nigeria advocates Swift’s Sanctions Screening to Nigerian banking community

Central Bank of Nigeria advocates Swift’s Sanctions Screening to Nigerian banking community

Compliance,
2 October 2014 | 5 min read

Sibos, Boston, 2 October 2014 - Swift announces today at Sibos that the Central Bank of Nigeria is implementing its Sanctions Screening service and is mandating use of the hosted service by the country's banking community in order to strengthen the Nigerian financial market and ensure it meets global best practices for financial crime compliance.

Swift Sanctions Screening is a hosted subscription service that filters messages in real time and checks against customers' selected sanctions lists. Once active, the Sanctions Screening service automatically routes messages in certain predefined categories to a centrally hosted filter where the messages are matched against a client's choice of sanctions lists. Sanctions Screening combines a highly sophisticated screening engine with Swift's security, resilience and reliability to create a world-class shared service. The screening engine checks for possible matches from sanctions lists information using logical tests to detect anagrams, inversion of letters, missing letters, misspellings, abbreviations and phonetic similarities.

Suleiman Barau, Deputy Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria, says: "With financial crime becoming more prevalent globally, it is now one of the biggest challenges facing the world's financial industry and every bank must play a role in combatting this challenge. Central Bank of Nigeria wants to ensure that Nigeria's financial community adheres to global best practice and complies with all international regulations. Implementing Swift's Sanctions Screening is an essential element of this strategy."

The Central Bank aims to complete the implementation by the commercial banks in Nigeria by the end January 2015. To assist the country's commercial banks to meet this deadline, the CBN has created a Sanctions Screening Service Committee, comprising 15 people from various departments, including operations, IT, legal, treasury and payments. The Committee will work with the Nigerian banking community and Swift.

The move can also be seen as pursuant to the Central Bank of Nigeria's Payment System Vision 2020 (PSV2020), which calls for a "Nationally Utilised and Internationally Recognised" payments system and provides a robust platform to support Nigeria's continued economic growth.

Christian Sarafidis, Deputy Chief Executive, EMEA, Swift, says: "Swift is delighted to support the Nigerian financial services community as it works towards its 2020 vision and implements global best practice in terms of new regulations. We are expanding our footprint in Africa to reflect the dynamism of the continent and particularly the rapid growth of Nigeria."

Sanctions Screening recently surpassed the 230-customer milestone just two years after its introduction as the first solution in Swift's financial crime compliance services portfolio. In Africa, there are currently more than 60 customers - now including seven central banks - using Sanctions Screening with more new customers in the pipeline.

Like Nigeria, several other countries have seen broad take-up of Sanctions Screening as part of a community approach to addressing concerns about financial crime and meeting global regulations, including Angola, Ghana and Sierra Leone.

"Sanctions compliance is complex and expensive, and the penalties for non-compliance can be very severe," says Hugo Smit, Head of Africa South, Swift. "Swift's Sanctions Screening is cost-effective and easy to implement. It requires no hardware or software and no operational maintenance of multiple lists that change regularly and provide our customers with a peace-of-mind that their compliance solution meet international industry standards. Swift is committed to developing such solutions that address industry challenges."

Banks using the Sanctions Screening service can send their transactions to a screening engine, which filters the messages in real time and checks against the banks' selected sanctions lists. The service covers the majority of the messages used in cross-border financial transactions and is expected to support all types of financial messages, including Single European Payment Area (SEPA) payments, in 2015.

About Swift's financial crime compliance services portfolio
Swift's Compliance Services unit manages a growing portfolio of financial crime compliance services in the areas of sanctions, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML).  Developed in collaboration with the financial community, the portfolio includes Sanctions Screening, an off-the-shelf transaction screening solution; and Sanctions Testing, which helps banks maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of their sanctions compliance. It also includes Compliance Analytics, a business intelligence tool that helps banks address financial crime risk by leveraging their Swift traffic data; and the KYC Registry, a centralised utility for the collection and distribution of standard information required by banks as part of their due diligence processes.

For more information, visit the Compliance Services on swift.com.

About Swift
Swift is a member-owned cooperative that provides the communications platform, products and services to connect more than 10,000 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 212 countries and territories. Swift enables its users to exchange automated, standardised financial information securely and reliably, thereby lowering costs, reducing operational risk and eliminating operational inefficiencies. Swift also brings the financial community together to work collaboratively to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest.

For more information, please visit http://www.swift.com/ or follow us on Twitter: @swiftcommunity and LinkedIn: Swift

Swift
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