Financial messaging body Swift has selected technology from Sword FircoSoft to support a new centralised sanctions screening service aimed at small banks.
Financial services firms have come under increasing pressure to ensure that payments are screened against sanction lists in recent years and more than $1 billion worth of fines have been handed out to non-compliant players over the last two years.
Swift pledged at last year's Sibos conference to improve the process designed to stop the flow of illegal money transfers by launching an outsourcing service for small banks.
The organisation told Finextra at the time that it was in the process of selecting a screening software provider for a Swift-branded service ahead of a formal proposal to its board.
A deal has now been inked with Sword FircoSoft for the provision of the underlying components of Sanctions Screening over Swift, which is slated to go live late this year.
Users of the new service will be able to request selected Swift Fin messages be routed to the centralised screening application, where they will be filtered in real time, and checked against customers' selected sanctions lists.
If there is no match to the sanctions list, the message will be delivered as usual. If there is a match, customers will be asked to instruct Swift as to whether to release, abort or flag the message via an alert management system.
Gottfried Leibbrandt, head, marketing, Swift, says: "The combination of Swift's security, resilience and reach among the financial institutions that need to comply with sanctions regulations and Sword FircoSoft's provision of market-leading filtering and list service solutions will deliver the best possible value to our customers."