Swift today announced the launch of an enhanced solution for managing payment investigations that could save the financial industry millions and significantly reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve issues when international payments are delayed.

Financial institutions spend more than USD 1.6 billion each year on labour-intensive processes to investigate payments that get held up – which can occur regardless of technology or network used – with some of the largest global banks incurring more than USD 20 million annually in fees and penalties only.

New research suggests Swift’s enhanced, network agnostic capability has the potential to cut the industry’s operational and liquidity costs in this area by more than USD 600 million per year, and reduce the time to resolve a case by up to 80 percent. These benefits could extend beyond payments on the Swift network to include any that leverage a unique end-to-end transaction reference (UETR), a standard that enables transparency on a payment's status and location at any stage of its lifecycle.

The speed of cross-border payments has significantly improved in recent years – 90% of transactions over Swift, for example, reach end banks within an hour – and most are automatically processed. Delays typically arise when a payment instruction is missing key information, and it can typically take five to ten working days for financial institutions to investigate and resolve these issues.

Swift’s Case Management solution standardises the investigation process, leverages ISO 20022 data and the UETR standard to provide transparency and interoperability across networks. By capturing information centrally, it eliminates the high number of manual touchpoints typically involved in an investigation between sending and receiving institutions.

Shirish Wadivkar, Global Head of Transaction Management, Swift said: “Inefficient investigations processes are impacting the industry greatly in terms of cost and time and drastically affecting the customer experience. Our enhanced solution addresses the main pain points in investigating incidents, helping our community make gains in efficiency, time, and costs to provide the experience that customers expect. It’s not only a great example of how the ISO 20022 standard can help our industry deliver better user experience by removing friction and providing transparency, but is also a case in point as to how Swift is committed to interoperating an increasingly complex financial ecosystem by extending the benefits of our solutions across networks.”

Swift is working to deliver instant and frictionless cross-border transactions, in line with the G20’s roadmap for an enhanced cross-border payments experience. Case Management is part of a suite of solutions available to Swift customers that help address friction in cross-border transactions. More than 30 global financial institutions have trialled the enhanced product successfully and it is now available to the entire global Swift community.

Isabel Schmidt, Executive Platform Owner, Enterprise Payments, at BNY, said: “We understand how critical real-time transparency is for our clients during payment investigations, and we continue to expect our clients to hold us to the highest standards when it comes to providing that transparency. A centralised tool will be a key step in enhancing the payment investigations process and creating operational costs efficiencies, while ultimately also improving overall client satisfaction and increasing the value we bring as a solution provider.”

Juan Olaizola, CEO, PagoNxt Payments Hub, a Santander Company, said: “With faster resolution times and greater transparency into the status of investigations, we can significantly enhance our customers’ experience. In turn, a better and more efficient management of payment incidents, will help reduce both our liquidity and operational costs. It’s a virtuous circle where everyone stands to benefit.”

Larize Nel, Head Payment External Gateways at ABSA, said: “This solution truly simplifies and optimises the world of investigations. Through the orchestration capabilities it delivers data quality, speed, and accuracy. Deeply underpinned is the value this will deliver to our customers. This is significant progress towards frictionless payments.”