Singapore/Hong Kong, 22 November 2022 – Swift was awarded Best Solution – Payments Fraud Prevention in the 5th Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2022 at an in-person ceremony on 22 November 2022.
Swift was recognised for Payment Controls, which helps financial institutions detect payment anomalies in real time that can be indicative of fraud or operational errors. The solution uses a rules-based approach to screen and validate payment messages from within Swift’s network, providing an additional layer of control to supplement existing fraud prevention tools in place at banks. Its risk scoring capabilities draw from modelling based on trends seen from historical payment traffic as well as leveraging fraud labels.
The rules and models established within Payment Controls were initially developed following extensive forensic investigations by Swift into compromises of some banks’ environments. Since the initial launch in 2018, the models and scenarios have been continually updated and refined to account for new attacks and emerging threats to banks, enabling them to stop and abort suspicious payments in-flight before they are delivered to the receiving bank.
This year, Payment Controls is being further enhanced to provide more granular and context-rich insights, by leveraging account-level activity data from the Swift network giving banks much needed visibility on what is happening more generally at a network level. Next year, additional network-based insights will be added to allow detection of activity spikes and money transfer spikes at an account level (ordering/beneficiary customer side) furthering the end customer use cases.
“Payment Controls has become an essential and highly effective tool for banks, given the prevalence of cyber criminals looking to penetrate banking networks,” noted one judge on the Regulation Asia awards panel. “The solution should be recognised as it is able to look at anomalies across multiple transactions, historical payment flows and data from the entire Swift network at once. This is only possible due to Swift’s unique position and ability to leverage vast network data.”
Over 900 BICs are now using the platform across 156 countries, including 245 in Asia Pacific – eight of which are central banks in the region.
About the Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2022
The Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence recognises financial institutions, technology companies, legal and consulting firms, exchanges and other players that help ensure the highest regulatory compliance standards are upheld in the financial industry. Each year, senior industry practitioners serve on a judging panel to help assess and score each submission to determine the winning entrants.
For a full list of the award 2022 winners, visit www.regulationasia.com/awards.
About Regulation Asia
Regulation Asia is the leading source of actionable regulatory intelligence for Asia Pacific markets. With over 12,000 subscribers, including regulatory bodies, exchanges, banks, asset managers and service providers, Regulation Asia plays a key role in shaping the regulatory agenda.
Visit www.regulationasia.com or connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.
