The industry utility - which has now crossed its 600-member milestone - enables banks to take a proactive approach in mitigating de-risking and building greater trust with the international financial community.

In May 2015, the Dominican Republic became the first country to implement SWIFT’s KYC Registry as a financial community. The adoption of SWIFT’s Sanctions Screening further attests its commitment to robust financial crime compliance while leveraging the benefits of SWIFT’s utility model.

Juan Manuel Taveras Lay, Controller, Dominican Republic Central Bank says, “Robust sanctions programs aligned with an organisation’s compliance policies help ensure that sanctioned individuals and institutions are detected correctly. Given the scale of the international correspondent bank network, having accurate sanctions technology in place is not only a regulatory responsibility, but also a priority for global security.”

“We welcome the Dominican Republic’s Central Bank decision to implement Sanctions Screening to further strengthen their financial crime compliance programme. Providing standardised solutions is at SWIFT’s core, and it translates into reduced risk and lower maintenance costs for our customers.” says Juan Martínez, Managing Director Latin America and the Caribbean, SWIFT. “As compliance and cybersecurity challenges become increasingly sophisticated, we are committed to helping banks to ensure payments are secure and compliant as well as faster and more transparent. Through our growing financial crime compliance portfolio combined with SWIFT’s Customer Security Programme, and global payments innovation initiative, we are addressing these dimensions together in order to take correspondent banking to the next level.”

Since its launch in 2012, SWIFT’s Sanctions Screening service has been adopted by customers in more than 140 countries, including entire banking communities. There are also 26 central banks using the service.