Swift MyStandards introduces the innovative Responder feature, driving faster, more efficient corporate-to-bank onboarding. Here’s what MyStandards users had to say about their experience with the new tool.
Onboarding new customers can be a costly and time-intensive undertaking. The initial implementation and testing phases often pose the biggest challenge for corporate banks, as ensuring specification compliance and identifying possible implementation pitfalls is a labour-intensive process. Testing solutions can be complex to set up and if testing isn’t done correctly prior to the pre-production testing phase, significant costs and delays can be the result.
“MyStandards provides our customers with an online platform that allows for a quicker customer onboarding, and reduces the expensive end-to-end testing cycle,” says Po Ngan, MyStandards Product Manager, Swift. “Customers have access to a customised, self-service testing environment and an onboarding process that can be closely monitored.” To complement this, Swift has now introduced Responder, an enhancement to MyStandards Premium+ that will optimise onboarding and self-service capabilities even more. It is available free of charge for users with a MyStandards Premium+ licence.
Collaborating with stakeholders
MyStandards Responder allows users to get a positive or negative response message from a valid input test message within the portal, simulating what would happen in a live production environment. This allows the tester to have a first look at what a response message from a bank or market infrastructure would look like, and whether their back-office systems can reconcile the response message.
This agile feature development is the direct outcome of user feedback and collaboration. “At a User Group meeting in December 2019, customers expressed the wish for a functionality that would further enhance the onboarding process from a corporate perspective,” Ngan explains. “By May 2020, we had developed a prototype based on stakeholders’ requirements, and a working group of banks was established to start beta testing. The group’s feedback inspired further improvements, and eventually shaped MyStandards Responder, which we launched in December 2020.”
Optimising implementation and testing
“Swift really listened to the voice of the client,” says William Porto, Vice President Digital Channels at J.P. Morgan Corporate & Investment Bank. “We’ve seen Swift evolve MyStandards throughout the years, and they have always listened to our ideas. We were one of the users telling Swift how great it’d be to further augment testing, and now they’ve introduced the Responder.”
The Responder will centralise the entire onboarding and testing process for clients. From a bank's perspective, client onboarding will be much more efficient. And of course, more efficient onboarding means earlier generation of business and client satisfaction.
Porto believes that Responder will help take J.P. Morgan’s initial implementation and testing phase to the next level: “The client will be able to upload a pain.001 file not only to receive validation, but also to test the acknowledgement process, and ingest the resulting pain.002 from the Responder side,” he says. “They won’t have to wait to receive this information in a production verification test.”
Isabelle Volckaert, Product Manager, e-Channels at BNP Paribas, agrees that “the Responder is a natural evolution of MyStandards,” which BNP uses as an implementation tool and a central repository of format specifications. The bank’s testing methodology requires customers to test the file structure and syntax against BNP Paribas message specifications.
“We’ve had clients tell us that building and testing complex XML message formats is three times faster using MyStandards,” she explains. “The quality of the messages generated by the client is much better, and the vast majority of syntax and structure errors can be removed before proceeding to the bank’s environment.” She continues, “and while MyStandards enables clients to test their transaction files, Responder offers the possibility to then test the integration of the bank file in their ERP.”
For BNP Paribas, MyStandards Responder is a great improvement to ease subsequent end-to-end testing in a bank’s environment, which isn’t always available. The feature is easy to implement, because “it’s just a question of activating the Responder button in the client portal. There is no need to make a set up in the bank’s environment for the client to start receiving samples of bank’s response messages,” Volckaert explains.
Increasing customer satisfaction and market revenue
The benefits are clear: “We’ve seen a reduction in testing time and an increase in the clients’ autonomy. This also means optimisation of our implementation team’s efficiency because they can now focus on more complex implementation questions,” Volckaert states.
“For the client it’s just clicking a button, and they’re in total control. The sequential iterations between the client and BNP are no longer needed and the client can test different scenarios easily, like the positive, the negative and the partial Payment Status Report.”
It’s just a question of activating the Responder button in the client portal. There is no need to make a client set up in the bank’s environment.
“The Responder will centralise the entire onboarding and testing process for clients,” Porto agrees. Customers will no longer have to worry about nuances in test setup or administration between one financial institution and another, they can use the same tool, login and password. “From a bank's perspective, client onboarding will be much more efficient. And of course, more efficient onboarding means earlier generation of business and client satisfaction,” he concludes.
And this is only the beginning. Next up in the MyStandards Responder journey is the incorporation of the statement report messages (camt.053 and camt.054), bringing global financial institutions and corporates another step closer to closing the corporate-to-bank onboarding loop.
