Singapore/Hong Kong, 14 November 2019 – SWIFT has won Best Solution in Transaction Monitoring in the 2nd Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2019 at a ceremony in Singapore on 13 November 2019.
After a rigorous selection process involving a judging panel made up of subject-matter experts and the Regulation Asia editorial team, SWIFT emerged as the winner for providing what the judges called “a powerful solution” to protect at-risk members of the correspondent banking network from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
SWIFT’s Payment Controls Service (PCS) was launched in September 2018, as part of a wider effort to address the current wave of cyber security and fraud concerns among financial industry regulators and participants. It was created in collaboration with banks and external cyber security experts.
PCS provides a preconfigured set of rules and models which can be customised based on an institution’s needs, working in real-time to allow users to detect and stop suspicious payments before they are delivered to the SWIFT network. The service additionally “learns” each institution’s payment patterns over time and highlights high risk payment instructions involving new counterparties, currencies, message types or combinations of these.
The service is currently being used by the central banks of Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Korea, New Zealand, Indonesia and Cambodia. The PCS initiative has also led to over 11,000 banks attesting their compliance to mandatory security controls to guard against fraud and drive network transparency.
Guy Sheppard, Head of APAC Financial Crime, Intelligence and Initiatives, SWIFT said: “As an industry cooperative, our objective at SWIFT is simple. In 2018, we launched the Payments Controls service as part of a community-driven initiative to offer our customers the right security tools to combat the rising incidence of payment fraud. The service makes it easier to mitigate fraudulent attacks by detecting and preventing high-risk payments and supporting recovery, through the combination of real-time monitoring, alerting and blocking of sent payments. This award is a feather in the cap for us, as we continue to make strides in strengthening and safeguarding the security of our ecosystem, and enhancing cybersecurity for the global financial industry as a whole.”
In the 2018 Regulation Asia Awards, SWIFT won Best KYC Utility for providing a global standard for the exchange of correspondent bank data and documentation through its KYC Registry. It also won the Regtech award for Big Data & Analytics for its Compliance Analytics tool – which enables financial institutions to better focus their investigations by providing a complete global view of branch and correspondent banking activity across all group entities.
About the Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2019
Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence recognises technology companies, legal and consulting firms, and exchanges that have shaped the regulatory landscape in Asia Pacific, as well as outstanding technology projects both in mature and emerging markets by large tech firms and innovative startups that help meet the requirements of a specific regulatory change infrastructure.
For a full list of award winners, visit www.regulationasia.com/awards.
About Regulation Asia
Regulation Asia is the leading source for actionable regulatory intelligence for Asia Pacific markets. Since 2013, our audience and subscription base have grown to include regulatory bodies, exchanges, banks, asset managers and service providers, allowing us to play a key role in the regulatory agenda.
Visit www.regulationasia.com or connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.
For more information, please contact:
Charmaine Athaide
Director, Programme Coordinator
Regulation Asia
+65 9023 4274
[email protected]
