/payments

News and resources on payments systems, innovations and initiatives worldwide.

Swift mines data flows to flag up incorrect payments

Bank-to-bank messaging network Swift has moved to eliminate payments friction by introducing a new capability to flag upfront when a payment may stall because of incorrect payee details,

  6 3 comments

Swift mines data flows to flag up incorrect payments

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

The new service analyses previous flows on the Swift network to identify accounts that have been credited successfully and uses this information to detect potential errors in payee information - the most common cause of cross-border delays.

This centralised verification, based on aggregated and anonymised data from nine billion transaction messages between four billion accounts each year, provides a level of insight no single financial institution has on its own.

“Think of it as the ultimate payment pre-check” says Thomas Zschach, chief innovation officer, Swift. “When someone wants to make an international payment, we can instantly predict the likelihood of success based on whether the account has been credited successfully in the past, and then present this information directly to the customer so that they can fix any errors or typos before the payment even starts its processing.”

The new capability is an expanded feature of Swift’s Payment Pre-validation service and is available to banks via an API.

Vijay Lulla, director, payments products, HSBC comments: “HSBC is an early adopter of Sswift’s Payment Pre-validation service and sees it as an important step in removing friction from cross-border payments by providing the capability to detect and prevent any issues before a transaction is completed. This provides our customers with a solution that helps to minimise the risk of payment delays.”

Sponsored [On-Demand Webinar] Solving the KYC challenge with end-to-end processes

Related Company

Comments: (3)

Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions

As I highlighted in my comment here, was an incident when Payor Bank / SWIFT forced customer to abbreviate payee name GTM360 MARKETING SOLUTIONS PRIVATE LIMITED because of field length limitation and customer changed it to GTM360 MARKETING SOLUTIONS INC. Payment failed. 

If the same thing happens, I'm hoping that SWIFT's new Payment PreValidation service will tell the payor to change the abbreviation to GTM360 MARKETING SOLUTIONS PVT LTD before submitting it, and that the payment won't fail. If so, this is a great feature. 

On a side note, given that this new centralized verification service identifies "accounts that have been credited successfully", the claim that it's "based on anonymised data" almost sounds like an oxymoron:)

Elliot Green

Elliot Green CMO at Wonderful Payments

Interesting. I see your point about anonymisation. I wonder if the feature would not specify the correct payee details, but merely let the user know that the details they themselves have entered look to be incorrect? 

Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions

Quite possible but then, this feature won't be useful in my use case because it's very unlikely that my customer in USA will substitute the wrong suffix INC with the right suffix PVT LTD by him/herself and the payment will continue to fail. 

[Webinar] 2025 Fraud Trends: Synthetic Identity, AI and Incoming MandatesFinextra Promoted[Webinar] 2025 Fraud Trends: Synthetic Identity, AI and Incoming Mandates