- The financial industry faces an estimated USD 1.6 billion in costs annually to investigate delayed payments across technologies and networks
- Swift’s Case Management service streamlines investigation processes, reducing costs and resolution times to significantly improve the customer experience
- The enhanced solution leverages rich ISO 20022 data and standardised transaction tracking — which could extend the benefits beyond the Swift network
Brussels, 17 April 2025 – Swift today announced the launch of an enhanced solution for managing payment investigations that could save the financial industry millions and significantly reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve issues when international payments are delayed.
Financial institutions spend more than USD 1.6 billion each year on labour-intensive processes to investigate payments that get held up – which can occur regardless of technology or network used – with some of the largest global banks incurring more than USD 20 million annually in fees and penalties only.
New research suggests Swift’s enhanced, network agnostic capability has the potential to cut the industry’s operational and liquidity costs in this area by more than USD 600 million per year, and reduce the time to resolve a case by up to 80 percent. These benefits could extend beyond payments on the Swift network to include any that leverage a unique end-to-end transaction reference (UETR), a standard that enables transparency on a payment's status and location at any stage of its lifecycle.
The speed of cross-border payments has significantly improved in recent years – 90% of transactions over Swift, for example, reach end banks within an hour – and most are automatically processed. Delays typically arise when a payment instruction is missing key information, and it can typically take five to ten working days for financial institutions to investigate and resolve these issues.
Swift’s Case Management solution standardises the investigation process, leverages ISO 20022 data and the UETR standard to provide transparency and interoperability across networks. By capturing information centrally, it eliminates the high number of manual touchpoints typically involved in an investigation between sending and receiving institutions.
Shirish Wadivkar, Global Head of Transaction Management, Swift said: “Inefficient investigations processes are impacting the industry greatly in terms of cost and time and drastically affecting the customer experience. Our enhanced solution addresses the main pain points in investigating incidents, helping our community make gains in efficiency, time, and costs to provide the experience that customers expect. It’s not only a great example of how the ISO 20022 standard can help our industry deliver better user experience by removing friction and providing transparency, but is also a case in point as to how Swift is committed to interoperating an increasingly complex financial ecosystem by extending the benefits of our solutions across networks.”
Swift is working to deliver instant and frictionless cross-border transactions, in line with the G20’s roadmap for an enhanced cross-border payments experience. Case Management is part of a suite of solutions available to Swift customers that help address friction in cross-border transactions. More than 30 global financial institutions have trialled the enhanced product successfully and it is now available to the entire global Swift community.
Isabel Schmidt, Executive Platform Owner, Enterprise Payments, at BNY, said: “We understand how critical real-time transparency is for our clients during payment investigations, and we continue to expect our clients to hold us to the highest standards when it comes to providing that transparency. A centralised tool will be a key step in enhancing the payment investigations process and creating operational costs efficiencies, while ultimately also improving overall client satisfaction and increasing the value we bring as a solution provider.”
Juan Olaizola, CEO, PagoNxt Payments Hub, a Santander Company, said: “With faster resolution times and greater transparency into the status of investigations, we can significantly enhance our customers’ experience. In turn, a better and more efficient management of payment incidents, will help reduce both our liquidity and operational costs. It’s a virtuous circle where everyone stands to benefit.”
Larize Nel, Head Payment External Gateways at ABSA, said: “This solution truly simplifies and optimises the world of investigations. Through the orchestration capabilities it delivers data quality, speed, and accuracy. Deeply underpinned is the value this will deliver to our customers. This is significant progress towards frictionless payments.”
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ABOUT SWIFT
Swift is a global member owned cooperative and the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services. We provide our community with a platform for messaging and standards for communicating, and we offer products and services to facilitate access and integration, identification, analysis and regulatory compliance.
Our messaging platform, products and services connect more than 11,500 banking and securities organisations, market infrastructures and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories. While Swift does not hold funds or manage accounts on behalf of customers, we enable our global community of users to communicate securely, exchanging standardised financial messages in a reliable way, thereby supporting global and local financial flows, as well as trade and commerce all around the world.
As their trusted provider, we relentlessly pursue operational excellence; we support our community in addressing cyber threats; and we continually seek ways to lower costs, reduce risks and eliminate operational inefficiencies. Our products and services support our community’s access and integration, business intelligence, reference data and financial crime compliance needs. Swift also brings the financial community together – at global, regional and local levels – to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest or concern.
Headquartered in Belgium, Swift’s international governance and oversight reinforces the globally inclusive character of its cooperative structure. Swift’s global office network ensures an active presence in all the major financial centres.
