Universal confirmations

All Swift users in the user categories Supervised Financial Institution (SUPE) and Payment System Participant (PSPA) that receive MTs 103 or pacs.008 messages are required to provide a status confirmation on the outcome of these payments as from Standards MT release 2020.

End-to-end tracking and confirmation of credit are essential because:

• These enable financial institutions to provide an enhanced experience to customers
• The drive efficiency gains by reducing the burden of exceptions and investigations through proactive confirmations
• These are the building blocks for developing future payment services

Universal Confirmations on your incoming MT 103 payments is mandatory since 22 November 2020. This is part of the annual Swift Standards Release process and is a mandatory change all FIN users in the user categories Supervised Financial Institutions (SUPE) and Payment System Participants (PSPA).

Universal Confirmations is mandatory for all 8-character BICs receiving MT 103 instructions. That means that even if you have one of your branches registered for a Swift GPI service, you’ll need to provide confirmations from your other branches which aren’t signed up to Swift GPI. This also includes all country corridors, so if you have certain corridors not on GPI yet, you will need to be able to provide confirmation updates for these messages too.

If you have completed your ISO 20022 migration, ensure you are not just ready to send pacs.008, but also able to confirm them. Use the checklist below to validate your end-to-end readiness:

Review your GPI and/or Universal Confirmation performance:

• Use Observer Insights or Basic Tracker to check your institution’s CCT confirmation rate by role e.g., Creditor Agent, Intermediary Agent.
• Pay close attention to BICs flagged as red or orange (i.e., BICs underperforming the 80% confirmation rate for Universal Confirmations or 90% rate for GPI).

Investigate root cause for any non-compliant BICs:

• Assess if there are any technical blockers preventing automated confirmations, such as the omission of confirmations of pacs.008 (including multi-format messages) in your ISO 20022 migration plans.
• Assess whether operators manually confirming have been trained to confirm pacs.008.

Check if your system is ready to process pacs.008 messages:

• Ensure your systems are configured to receive and process pacs.008 and multi-format messages.
• If you are currently using MT 199 status updates to the Tracker, consider switching to TRCK or API based updates as part of the remediation plan.
• Work with your vendors/partners to ensure their confirmation process is ready and working as expected for receiving pacs.008 and multi-format messages

Test your confirmation process(es) to ensure readiness:

• Use the Swift Test Sparring Partner (TSP) environment to:
  • Simulate pacs.008 messages.
  • Confirm that status updates (ACCC, RJCT, ACSP, etc.) are being captured and routed correctly.

Swift recommends providing a final confirmation as soon as the transaction has been processed, that is, confirmed credit, transferred, on hold, or rejected.

Confirmations are still considered compliant when received within two business days after the value date indicated in the element Interbank Settlement Date.

There are several ways you can confirm your payments, both automated and manual.

For institutions who handle low volumes of customer payments, you can access our free Basic Tracker tool. The Basic Tracker allows you to manually confirm payments, whilst also accessing some basic search and tracking features.

For institutions that handle higher volumes of payments, there are four other options:

• MT 199 – All Swift customers can confirm payments by sending an interbank payment message (MT 199) to a dedicated Tracker BIC through their existing Swift interface.
• Batch confirmations – A batch confirmations standard is available through your Swift Alliance interface, allowing you to reduce the implementation effort to a simple end-of-day export file in CSV format from their payment application.
• API - All Swift users are now able to use Swift Micro Gateway or SDK to update the Tracker using the unique tracking code of the transaction.
• TRCK - An ISO 20022-compliant XML messaging standard to provide confirmations to the Tracker.

Learn more

Universal Confirmations application providers

The Basic Tracker

The Basic Tracker enables banks handling low volumes of customer payments to provide payment confirmations free of charge. The Basic Tracker also provides a limited set of features to track and search payments, as well as monitor your Universal Confirmations compliance, although these features may be limited if you don’t meet the confirmations mandate.

Learn more

Swift GPI

Swift GPI, meanwhile, is a paid for service, which includes advanced search and tracking, view on deducts, intermediary routings, send and receive amounts, FX and more, as well as value-added services to reduce friction. In addition, Swift GPI customers are also able to integrate tracking and confirmation features into their customer-facing channels, enabling automated status updates directly to end customers.

Learn more

A simple traffic light system is in place to monitor compliance. 

• Green indicates institutions are fully compliant.
• Orange indicates institutions are not compliant for one week. In the case of an orange indicator, institutions have 12 weeks to reach compliance before being issued a red rating.
• Red indicates institutions that are not compliant and have missed the 12-week compliance cut off.

Financial institutions that have become ‘red’ lose the possibility to search for their outbound transactions in the Basic Tracker.
Financial institutions always keep their access to the Basic Tracker, even with a ‘red’ status.

For more information about these rules, please visit the Basic Tracker documentation