Discover our new services, developed in collaboration with 25 leading banks and 26 corporates across various sectors and regions, to enhance the payment experience in corporate banking.
Corporates worldwide face a range of challenges in managing payments. Gaining visibility into the status of their cross-border transactions can be difficult, as can achieving transparency on FX rates and associated charges. Additionally, reconciliation is often complex due to a lack of rich, structured data.
As part of our strategy to enable instant and frictionless transactions, we are committed to helping financial institutions enhance the corporate payment experience while delivering value to the banking community. To support this, we have introduced the first wave of new capabilities designed to improve customer experience and increase payment transparency for corporates.
At the heart of this initiative is our Corporates Working Group. This group includes 25 leading banks and 26 corporates from various sectors and regions. Supported by a network of eight technology partners, this group play a vital role in identifying key challenges, shaping priorities, and piloting new capabilities.
Standardising payments with ISO 20022
One of our priorities is extending the rich data across the payment chain. This will help corporates and banks streamline their cross-border payments by ensuring end-to-end data integrity.
By making our new FINplus service available to the corporate community, we’re introducing a payment instruction standard for corporates enabling them to reap the benefits of ISO 20022, such as improved reconciliation, better forecasting of payment flows, and improved working capital management.
“With ISO 20022 the goal is to provide corporates and banks with a single standard that improves cross-border payments." says Brice Goemans, Corporates Product Owner at Swift “This will enable them to fully benefit from the rich data, increased speed and interoperability it offers, enhancing reconciliation.”
ISO 20022 for payment initiation is now available for corporate users.
Offering innovative services for corporates
Thanks to our new Swift API and messaging channel, financial institutions are now able to deliver an improved payments experience to corporate clients by offering bespoke, ready-made services with ease. This advancement allows corporates to connect to all their banks through a single Swift service.
Already live, the first of these services enables banks to provide tracking for inbound and outbound payments globally, without the need for a lengthy implementation process. Corporate clients can quickly and easily gain complete visibility over the status of their payments, including confirmation when payments have been received.
This enhancement allows corporate treasurers to accurately forecast cash flow and liquidity positions, with far simpler reconciliation which is enabled by a unique end-to-end reference (UETR) and payment remittance information.
“By facilitating end-to-end transparency, corporates can gain more visibility over things like FX rates, deductions and their incoming payments. And, integration with treasury management systems and ERP systems will provide a single window for payments across multiple banks,” says Rishikesh Tinaikar, Global Head of Corporates and Trade, Go to Market at Swift.
There is minimal implementation required to get started. To learn more about the payment tracking service, explore ready-made services.
Instant Cash Reporting
To make informed decisions, corporate treasurers first need an accurate view of cash balances and transactions - a challenge, especially for corporates with numerous bank accounts globally.
With our new standardised cash reporting API, corporates and their banks now have access to Instant Cash Reporting. Through our multi-bank API gateway, corporates can request and view account balances, statements, and transaction summaries from the banks that support this API. All information is provided in the new ISO 20022 messaging format, ensuring it is delivered nearly instantly and in a structured, consistent way.
Companies adopting Instant Cash Reporting will benefit from streamlined reconciliation, improve cash forecast accuracy, and enhanced data quality.
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond
The goal of our new services is to enable banks to offer more value-added services to their corporate clients, ensuring a superior payments experience.
End to end ISO 20022 enablement is a key focus. Building on our work on payment initiation, we are expanding to include cash reporting through standardised cash management messages. This will support end-to-end data preservation throughout the payment chain from initiation to reconciliation.
We’ll also continue working with financial institutions to enhance their ability to offer ready-made services to corporates. Building on the tracking service, our next focus will be on self-service capabilities for Stop & Recall, as well as exploring ways to simplify payment initiation through payment preparation capabilities.
Our ongoing developments aim to prevent fraudulent and erroneous payments, further enhance efficiency through automation, and improve customer experience.
Want to learn more?
Contact your Swift relationship manager.
