Daily Validation Reports
To safeguard your financial institution against cyber-threats, our Daily Validation Reports offer a secure, comprehensive view of your Swift transactions. These reports help with data analysis and trend detection, so you can proactively counter potential cyber-attacks and ensure the integrity of your transaction records and system files.
Benefits
Frequently Asked Qusetions
Why has Swift developed Daily Validation Reports?
One element of recent insider fraud attacks involves attackers hiding the evidence of fraudulent wire payments they’ve sent. In these incidents, fraudsters delete logs, manipulate transaction records, system files and database records, and in some cases, crash or leave environments in an unrecoverable state. Our smaller customers are dependent on the accuracy of the data on their own systems. In the event of a security breach, local environments can no longer be trusted to present a true record of transaction activity. Daily Validation Reports provides a view of Swift’s record of a customers’ activity that can be used to independently verify, in aggregate form, payment messages that have been sent or received.
How do Daily Validation Reports work?
Daily Validation Reports are available daily and leverage the underlying BI platform used by Watch and Compliance Analytics tools. Customers log in through www.swift.com. The reports provide aggregate reporting of transaction activity to allow review of inbound and outbound payments by currency, country and counterparty bank.
The reports allow the customer to see the originator, sender, receiver and beneficiary counterparty banks and the aggregate transaction activity by value, volume, currency and message type, with values normalised to a user-selected base currency.
Message type filters allow quick access to data. Within each report, you can see daily payment value and volume averages (calculated over a 24-month period), along with a percentage change indicator, allowing rapid identification of significant variations in payment patterns. You can export report information to Excel or similar tools.
Who will benefit from Daily Validation Reports?
Daily Validation Reports are designed primarily for smaller institutions that might lack the most sophisticated tools to respond robustly to fraud threats, or react in the event of fraudulent activity. They will be most useful for institutions with smaller transaction volumes, since they require manual review processes.
What about larger customers?
Larger institutions will typically have more comprehensive cyber defences and fraud prevention controls, as well as their own backup reporting systems. Their large transaction volumes mean that a manual review process using Daily Validation Reports might be less suitable but useful for smaller branches of larger institutions.
Which area of my institution will benefit from Daily Validation Reports?
Daily Validation Reports are a secondary control to verify and understand payment activity. Payment operations, compliance and fraud prevention teams will benefit from the reports.
Will I only get Daily Validation Reports if I ask, or will I automatically get them?
This is a service available to customers who specifically subscribe to it. Order daily validation reports today.
How many users can a customer have?
The license includes five users. Further blocks of 10 users can be purchased separately.
What’s required to start using Daily Validation Reports?
Very little. The reports are designed to be quick and easy to use and there’s minimal customer configuration. Following receipt of an e-order, we’ll grant access and access roles must then be allocated by the customer. We provide training materials and user guides.
Are there any existing alternatives to Daily Validation Reports?
No other vendor can provide access to Swift’s record of transaction activity.
One alternative to Daily Validation Reports is to use FIN Inform/FIN Copy to deliver copies of messages to a separate interface to create a separate database to generate similar reports. Some larger customers already do this.
Other alternatives include using commercially available fraud detection and prevention tools. However, in the event of cyber compromise these tools could be bypassed by a fraudster.
How much will Daily Validation Reports cost?
Contact your Swift account manager for details on pricing.
Will Swift be opening and reading messages to produce these reports?
We’ve designed the service in full compliance with our policies and under Swift Board governance. We have strong safeguards in place, and access to data is fully in line with other Swift data analytics services, such as Business Intelligence and Compliance Analytics.
Do Daily Validation Reports mean that Swift will do the fraud detection for the customer?
No, absolutely not. Customers are fully responsible for validating that their payments activity is correct.
Are customers obliged to take Daily Validation Reports to meet Customer Security Programme (CSP) security guidelines?
No, Daily Validation Reports are an additional control that customers can use, depending on their environment and as a way to supplement other controls they may have in place. A subscription to Daily Validation Reports does not remove other obligations. Customers must still meet security guidelines defined as part of the Customer Security Programme and also must report attempted and actual cyber fraud events to Swift.