Establish and maintain cybersecurity processes

In order to conduct business over the Swift network, users need to form commercial relationships with other Swift users, with whom they exchange business messages. An integral part of managing these relationships is to establish and maintain cybersecurity processes for your organisation in order to effectively minimise risk.

Managing counterparty risk is critical to cybersecurity planning, and needs to be considered alongside other key areas of risk - operational, financial and regulatory. Through the Customer Security Programme (CSP), counterparty information can be obtained and used to improve an institution’s overall counterparty risk management process.

Assessing Cybersecurity Counterparty Risk outlines various approaches to developing an effective risk framework for institutions working to integrate counterparty risk assessment into their existing cybersecurity processes.
 

Payments risk management tools

The key steps to achieve a successful management of counterparty risk are:

• Establish a governance model for cybersecurity risk management involving stakeholders in business, payments operations, IT, risk, compliance & audit departments, with oversight responsibility lying with senior business
• Establish a cybersecurity risk management framework which covers gathering counterparty risk data (for example attestation data), assessing the data, and developing appropriate measures to manage the risks identified
• Adopt risk mitigating countermeasures, for example leveraging the business relationship with the counterparty or involving stricter transactional governance
• Incorporate counterparty attestation data by integrating information into the existing risk management framework