At the EBADay conference this week in Munich, Swift CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt spoke of the sometimes challenging balancing act between innovation and risk.
EBAday is the European payment industry’s leading forum to learn, discuss and debate the key trends driving change in the sector. It attracts over 1,000 senior representatives from leading banks and financial institutions.
Leibbrandt shared his perspective on how security is of paramount importance to Swift and at the very core of everything it does, detailing the multi-layered approach Swift takes to cyber security. He also covered the Swift Customer Security Programme and the evolving cyber threat to the financial industry – and how Swift is helping banks and customers to better protect themselves with initiatives such as the Swift ISAC, a portal to share indicators of compromise and the latest techniques of cyber attackers.
However, whilst cyber security is vital, it should not prevent an organisation from innovating. Leibbrandt reflected on how Swift was using APIs to enrich and maximise its services such as gpi and discussed the increasing importance of the role of artificial intelligence in financial services, helping deliver insightful business intelligence from the vast amounts of data produced every day.
Launched just 15 months ago, gpi now represents 25% of all Swift cross border payment traffic, according to the latest data. It dramatically enhances the customer experience by increasing the speed, transparency and end-to-end tracking capability of payments.
The biggest corridor for payments over Swift GPI is between China and the US, as Chinese banks vie to keep pace with competitors from the e-commerce arena such as WeChat and Alipay.
"As transactions increasingly move to a real-time environment, Swift will soon introduce a new "stop and recall" feature via gpi for suspicious payment messages in a matter of minutes,” said Leibbrandt.
You can find out more about EBADay here.
Read the FinExtra live blogs on Day 1 and Day 2.
