ICBC will now be able to draw upon targeted business analysis and insights from SWIFT data using SWIFT Business Intelligence (BI) solutions; Watch Traffic Analytics, Watch Banking Analytics, and Watch Banking Analytics Premium, with the latter launched in 2015, as well as SWIFT’s peer benchmarking service.

Through implementation of the solutions, ICBC will be able to perform the following:

• Conduct comprehensive analysis and reporting of group-wide SWIFT message flows and aggregated SWIFT totals
• Analysis of cross-border payments in various countries and regions
• Access to accurate and timely information on the development of the RMB internationalisation
• Benchmarking performance in key markets against a set of anonymised peers using the peer benchmarking service
• Gain access to additional payload information: Account Servicing Institution, Account with Institution and Charging information.

“As a global financial institution, ICBC has been focussing in particular on the strength of our cross-border payments and clearing. To achieve this we wanted to gain greater insight into market data as well as our traffic over SWIFT,” says Gao Jun, Deputy Head of Operation Management Department, ICBC. “As we began to use SWIFT Watch BI, we soon realised how effortless it was to obtain and analyse market data, particularly the cross-border payment market’. Through SWIFT Services, on boarding and training was simple and efficient, enabling all new end-users to get up to speed with the tools.”

“ICBC is a great example of a bank that sees the value of deeper analysis of not only its own data but of its peers’ wider market data, providing tangible and actionable insights to help shape strategic business decisions,” says Astrid Thorsen, Head of Business Intelligence Solutions at SWIFT.

“The intuitive nature of SWIFT’s BI portfolio provides comprehensive and drill-down analysis on a wide range of data, making it a powerful tool for banks in helping them understand their market and their footprint in that market,” adds Geertjan van Bochove, Head of Analytics, Asia-Pacific at SWIFT. “We are delighted to have implemented our entire Watch portfolio of solutions at ICBC and we look forward to supporting them moving forward.”

Watch for Banking products and services are part of SWIFT’s BI portfolio, which was launched in 2005. The portfolio encompasses a broad suite of intuitive tools including analytics, insights, consulting services and economic indicators. Based on SWIFT message flows, BI’s products and services provide timely, transparent, and consolidated ready-to-use market information about customers’ flows, including payments, securities, treasury and trade finance.

SWIFT BI Services provides onboarding and training to ICBC, demonstrating how to define and interpret data to generate answers to end-users’ business needs.