As the demands of international businesses for speedier cross-border payments continue to grow, banks are under increased pressure to keep these payments compliant and secure. At the same time, regulators are focusing on international payments, which are subject to complex and expanding anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions regulations.

This means that compliance teams are being pushed to ensure their businesses remain competitive, as well as staying compliant.

The real-time challenge

The convenience of real-time payments is great news for customers, but alongside the benefits that come additional compliance risks and challenges.

As payments get faster, compliance teams need to effectively manage and monitor risk across the globe. They play a critical role in real-time, cross-border payments, facilitating greater levels of transparency, trust and collaboration.

One of the main challenges for compliance teams is how current controls can be adapted to facilitate real-time payments. And with as many as 10% of cross-border payments still held up for review by different banks, straight-through processing is difficult to achieve.

With instant settlement, there is also the risk that criminals seek to exploit the convenience of faster payments for fraud and money laundering purposes so having the right risk and compliance tools in place is critical.

Unlocking real-time payments depends on banks having clean, complete and correctly formatted data. Compliance processes -- including sanctions screening and FATF 16 adherence -- can only be effective if the information in payment messages is accurate.

A community approach

Making safe, secure, real-time cross-border payments a reality requires community involvement. This allows compliance teams to harness mutualised solutions to create a globally secure network.

As a community, we have already taken significant steps towards creating community-wide solutions to speed up the compliance process. SWIFT"s KYC Registry is just one example. It allows banks to exchange accurate data on a secure platform to streamline the KYC process between correspondent banks.

What else is SWIFT doing?

At SWIFT, we are driving the creation of community-wide solutions to enable fast and secure payments that are ready for straight-through processing. We offer a range of hosted, in-network solutions for sanctions and fraud screening, KYC and AML. And with our unique perspective on the world of payments compliance, we are helping our community meet today's challenges and forge a path for the future.

Join us at Sibos

With so much change in the world of compliance, there will be plenty to discuss at this year's Sibos, the world's premier financial services event, which takes place in London from 23-26 September.

Our SWIFT at Sibos programme will address some of the major themes affecting compliance professionals today including real-time payments. We will also look at the impact of new technologies and the opportunities these create for compliance.

Always working to build best-in-class compliance solutions for our community, we'll present the latest advances in sanctions testing and fraud prevention, as well as the new KYC Registry for corporates.

Join us to hear from industry experts in the areas of real-time payments, sanctions, anti-money laundering, fraud prevention, and KYC. Learn about new compliance challenges and opportunities -- and what they mean for your business.