A bank-led initiative to develop a utility model for end-to-end automation in the payment investigations process is being held back by a lack of corporate involvement.
The Exceptions & Investigations (E&I) Task Force was formed in 2010 by six global banks as part of an effort to encourage greater adoption of the XML messaging standard ISO20022 which forms the basis of the E&I service developed by bank-owned financial messaging body Swift.
But the underwhelming response of the corporate community was apparent at a presentation made by the Task Force at the annual congress of Swift. While the conference session was well populated by bankers and vendors, not a single corporate was in attendance.
Bryan Kirkpatrick, senior product manager, treasury services, BNY Mellon said that he was "disappointed by the rate of uptake but at least the trends are going in the right way". So far there are 131 banks and corporates signed up to the project with 26 of them in a position to go live by the middle of 2012. Live traffic has also surpassed test traffic, although the lack of participants means that the figures can vary markedly.
BNY Mellon, for example, has five active clients on the E&I system and deals with 100 cases and 300 messages a month, however one client is responsible for 90% of that volume. "It is a little disappointing not to have more corporates involved," said Frank Dilorenzo, managing director, global payment operations, BNY Mellon.
"They are more demanding of their banks when it comes to investigations - they want the answer before they've asked the question - but I don't know how you can meet these demands without automation."
Swift first developed its E&I platform in 2006 and made it available for corporate use in 2008. More recent work has focused on encouraging greater adoption among banks and corporates of the ISO20022 messaging standard.
There are some signs of encouragement though. Kirkpatrick added that automated payment investigations and standardised message formats are increasingly requested in the RFPs of certain corporates. And the hope is that as the E&I initiative gains scale, it can take on an industry utility status. "From there we can develop services on a utility basis rather than internally," said Madhavan Ramaswamy, managing director, global head of product management, transaction banking, Standard Chartered.