Payment Controls
DemoObtain a unique view on payment anomalies observed at network level and enhance your fraud detection insights with Payment Controls. Set your own rules to match your risk comfort and let it alert or block messages presenting anomalies in real time. Now even smarter, Payment Controls uses shared pseudonymised account information to detect anomalies at the customer and account level. Simple, secure, and proactive – that's how we keep your transactions safe.
Benefits
Frequently Asked Questions
How can Payment Controls help detect and prevent payments fraud against your institution?
Your institution can be targeted by internal or external fraudsters in several different ways, including cyber compromises. Payment Controls allows you to set configurable rules looking at one or a combination of payment parameters, to alert and/or block your outgoing Swift FIN and ISO 20022 payments (MT103, MT202, MT202cov, pacs008, pacs009, pacs004). This can allow you to identify suspicious payments in real-time, preventing potential financial loss and reputational damage. It also provides you with an independent daily record of your incoming and outgoing payment transaction activity (MT103, 202 COV, 202, 205, 205 COV), allowing you to quickly identify if your internal records have been compromised or are incomplete.
How can Payment Controls help address payments fraud targeting your customers and counterparties?
Payment Controls allows you to detect anomalies at the account level, based on rules that leverage unique data from the entire Swift network. It provides you with more visibility on creditor, debtor and pairs of accounts and flows from other financial institutions in a pseudonymized way. You can detect repetitive payments across the network, as well as new scenarios, unusually high aggregated amounts or exchanged messages, as well as problematic accounts.
How can Payment Controls help mitigate the risks of operational payment errors?
Operational payment risks are on the rise and errors can lead to reputational damage, financial loss and regulatory scrutiny. Payment Controls can’t prevent these errors, but it can help you detect and block such payment errors before they’re released from the Swift network. With rule combinations and account-level insights leveraging Swift network data, Payment Controls can be configured to address specific risks and flows.
How do Payment Control alerting and reporting supplement each other?
Swift Payment Controls can provide a comprehensive solution with both alerting and reporting capabilities. The Payment Controls Reporting module (also known as Daily Validation Reports) is an optional add-on when subscribing to Swift Payment Controls. This reporting module provides a daily (T+1) independent summary of your inbound and outbound payment flows, based on our secure record of your transaction activity, and reports on payment risks. You can use Activity Reporting to reconcile your institutional records against an independent source, and Risk Reporting to tune rules in the alerting module. You can find out more from your Swift representative.
What message types are covered by Payment Controls?
Payment Controls alerting supports the screening of your outgoing FIN and ISO 20022 payment messages (MT 103, MT 202, MT 202 COV, pacs.004, pacs.008, pacs.009). Payment Controls Reporting does this for both sent and received payments. For more information, read this KB article.
Who should use Payment Controls?
Payment Controls specifically addresses the needs of smaller institutions active in the commercial banking area, with limited resources and lower volumes of Swift messages. It’s easy to implement, simple to use and affordable, so is ideally suited to the needs of smaller banks. The service features an optional reporting component, which customers are already using to supplement their existing fraud controls. Payment Controls is used by compliance, operations and payments teams.
When was Payment Controls launched?
Payment Controls was launched in October 2018, following extensive pilot testing. Since then, we’ve continued to enhance the service, based on customer feedback and evolving fraud threats.
What’s the link between Payment Controls and Swift’s Customer Security Programme?
Swift is committed to developing new services to reduce the threat of cyberattack and fraud, as well as strengthen areas of potential weakness in your payment processing. Payment Controls is an important part of our Customer Security Programme (CSP), a community-driven initiative that’s enhancing cyber security for the global financial industry.
Swift CSP requires banks to adopt suitable payment business transaction controls and processes, while also securing their local environment. So, adding fraud prevention solutions to our Financial Crime Compliance portfolio helps our community safeguard their operations and fight cybercrime.
Is Payment Controls a mandatory part of the Customer Security Programme?
Payment Controls is an optional service. We require customers to self-attest to their organisation’s level of compliance with our customer security controls. This self-attestation is done using the KYC Registry Security Attestation Application.
