Following the completion of a successful early adopter programme, SWIFT’s Watch for Securities is ready for full scale use by local and global custodians, investment banks, asset managers and broker/dealers.

The new Watch for Securities solution builds on SWIFT’s existing business intelligence portfolio traditionally focused on payments. The new solution covers settlement and corporate actions flows primarily used to facilitate cross border transactions between global custodians and investment banks and their counterparties including local agents and asset managers. Watch for Securities provides securities market players with additional independent and monthly aggregated global traffic information saving financial institutions the time and effort of gathering that same data from multiple proprietary systems and locations. The analytics provided by Watch for Securities enables financial institutions to measure and benchmark their own activities with the overall activity on SWIFT, segregated by client type.

“Driving business performance from data is no longer just a “nice-to-have,” says Stephen Gilderdale, Head of New Business Development at SWIFT. “With massive amounts of unstructured data available, many financial institutions need to find new ways to turn data into meaningful business insights. Based on our highly structured data flows, SWIFT has been providing business intelligence services to payments customers for ten years. We are pleased to evolve and extend this service to our securities customers, particularly in the areas of corporate actions processing and settlement services.”

“The business intelligence tools from SWIFT, including Watch for Securities, help our customers make better use of their data to measure and benchmark their performance versus the market,” adds Fabian Vandendreydt, Head of Markets Management, Innotribe and the SWIFT Institute at SWIFT. “Through Watch for Securities customers can obtain valuable insights into how securities markets are evolving, and their share of activity in particular markets. The tool also measures the relative efficiency of a customer’s operations against the market as a whole.”