In April 2012, SWIFT launched Sanctions Screening to help its community keep up with increasing regulatory obligations. Complying with evolving sanctions regulations and frequently updated lists has become more complex, costly and time-consuming for financial institutions. Just over one year on, the service is thriving with small and medium-sized banks in over 50 countries adopting the service.

"The uptake of Sanctions Screening has surpassed our expectations" says Brigitte De Wilde, Head of AML and Sanctions Initiatives, SWIFT. "The strong adoption highlights the need for our customers to have a cost effective service to screen financial transactions and address the challenges of keeping up-to-date with ever-changing sanctions lists"

Confirming the value of Sanctions Screening, Narendra Singh, Chairman and Managing Director, Bank of Maharashtra, comments "It is very easy to operate and because we already use SWIFT messaging, it is cost effective and user friendly. Sanctions Screening is perfect in all respects and very easy to implement".

"The successful acceptance of our compliance services such as Sanctions Screening illustrates the important move by the community to join forces and address common regulatory issues" observes Luc Meurant, Head of Compliance Services, SWIFT. "We have a number of new services which we are developing and we will continue to further explore and leverage our capabilities in this area to assist our members in their financial crime compliance challenges".

The Sanctions Screening service operates by requesting selected SWIFT FIN messages be routed to the centralised screening application, where they will be filtered in real time and checked against customers' selected sanctions lists.  The service has already been adopted by four central banks and in excess of 30,000 messages are screened daily.

At Sibos in Dubai, there will be a demonstration of Sanctions Screening and SWIFT's Compliance offering on the SWIFT stand (D117). There is also a session on Wednesday 18 September in the SWIFT Auditorium where customers will share their experience with the Sanctions Screening service in their challenge to achieve cost-effective sanctions regulation compliance.