SWIFT Matters

A community that concentrates on SWIFT as an important business tool in the payments and standards world.

Retired Member 

SWIFT Changes for 2009-MT202COV

Currently the messages MT103 / 103+ are used to effect a customer credit transfer and the MT 202 is used for a financial institution transfer. In order to speed up the payment process for customer credit transfers in some cases an additional cover payment message (MT202) is sent to an intermediary bank whereas the underlying customer credit tr...

19 May 2009 /payments /wholesale

Retired Member 

Is SWIFT doing enough? Is it evolving at enough pace?

SWIFT decided to move to XML standards in year 1999. Since then, we have been hearing about MX standards (XML based). In all SWIFT presentations I have seen so far, I always hear about MX messages. SWIFT also maintains and releases MX standards every year. I always get a message that SWIFT will finally be moving everything to MX, but I never get ...

17 August 2008 /sibos

Retired Member 

Asia beckons

It's great to see, in what others see as a fairly dry world, that asset servicing is heading up the agenda not just in the west, but also in the east. SWIFT is hosting two half day conferences for custodians and asset managers in August, the first in Singapore on August 5th and the second in Hong Kong on August 8th. My interest, which I'll declar...

01 July 2008 /wholesale

Retired Member 

When you're up to your neck in liquidity...

I note with continuing interest the news that the central banks are continuing to pump money into the markets to "ease liquidity" with a stunning lack of effect. It occurs to me that they seem to be missing the point. The issue is not a lack of funds, its a lack of trust. In essence, we're actually all swimming in a vast pool of liquidi...

08 April 2008 /wholesale

Retired Member 

Corporate Actions Automation - a contradiction in terms?

I was quite intrigued back in October when I was walking around the exhibition halls at SIBOS in Boston to see how many software vendors on the corporate actions side were promoting their solutions for custodians, brokers and funds as STP. It seems to me we need to disconnect the marketing hype from the extremely fragmented reality of corporate a...

29 November 2007 /wholesale

Retired Member 

The SWIFT Future

The excellent article Chris Skinner wrote re: SWIFT numbers intrigued me. I wondered if you take these very simple parameters and use them to predict growth, what will SWIFT look like in the coming years? So, as one does, I took the figures he gave in his article and created a spreadsheet which is available by clicking here. (Okay, okay, I had t...

01 May 2007 /payments

Retired Member 

The SWIFT Challenge

As any politician will tell you, the first 100 days for a new leader are crucial as your audience is receptive, forgiving and open to change; after this though the judgments start to be made and the cracks begin to appear. So what should Campos concentrate on in his first 100 days as the new CEO of SWIFT? What are the challenges the organizati...

03 April 2007 /payments

Retired Member 

SWIFT Matters

I have read several articles in the financial press recently that so obviously regurgitate old press clippings. This laziness on the part of journalists leads to some regular and common inaccuracies, but none more so than the myth that abounds that SWIFT was ‘co-founded’ by Bessel Kok and a couple of friends! Why am I bothered you could ask, well...

28 February 2007 /payments /wholesale