Author : Ashish Pandey ,
Trace Software Provide Swift messaging services in India, UK, Middle East etc. You can contact us at info@tracesoftware.in or you can visit our website www.tracesoftware.in
Today, you can walk into any bank and transfer money all-round the globe very easily. All the international money and security transfers are facilitated by the SWIFT system, a vast messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and securely send and receive information such as money transfer instructions. Each day, nearly 10,000 SWIFT member institutions send more than 24 million messages on the network.
Let us explore more about the workings of SWIFT MESSAGING. What is SWIFT MESSAGING Service? SWIFT stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is a messaging network that the financial institutions use to globally transfer information and instructions securely via a standardized system of codes.
SWIFT stands for the “General public for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.” SWIFT is a system of more than 8,300 banks, securities, and partnerships situated in more than 208 nations. SWIFT takes into consideration the trading of a large number of institutionalized monetary messages between money related organizations all through the world. SWIFT was made in 1973 by investors who needed a more productive and secure framework for interbank interchanges and exchange of assets and securities. Preceding SWIFT, all correspondence between banks was finished by phone, wire, dispatch or mail. Preceding SWIFT messages between banks contained no directions past the fundamental assets exchange itself, however, SWIFT enables the banks to connect messages and conditions to finance exchanges. Every SWIFT message is a state of wire exchange.
SWIFT CODE: Each financial organization is assigned a unique code of either 8 characters or 11 characters. The code is called by various names such as SWIFT code, Bank Identifier Code(BIC), SWIFT ID or ISO 9362 code. Let us breakdown a hypothetical SWIFT code BBBBUS3M489 given to a bank:
1st four characters: BBBB is the institution code (like ICIC for ICICI bank)
Next two characters: US is the country code (IN for India)
Next two characters: 3M is the location/city code
Last three characters: Optional, organizations use it to assign codes to individual branches.
SWIFT CODE USERS: SWIFT was initially designed to facilitate communication about Treasury and correspondent transactions only. Overtime, due to the security and reliability of the system, following Institutions started using the services of SWIFT:
SWIFT SERVICES
Messaging and Connectivity: The centre of SWIFT business revolves around giving a secure, reliable and scalable system for the smooth transfer of messages. Through its different messaging hubs and network connections, SWIFT offers numerous products and services which empower its end customers to send and receive the messages.
Applications:
SWIFT connections enable access to a variety of applications which include real-time instruction matching for treasury and forex transactions, banking market Infrastructure for processing payment instructions between the banks, and securities market infrastructure for processing clearing and settlement instructions for payments, securities, forex, and derivatives transactions.
Business Intelligence:
Clients have a dynamic, real-time view of the messages and can monitor the transactions, trade flow, activity. They have access to reports which have filters such as region based, country based, and various other parameters.
SWIFT Money Generation Model
SWIFT is a cooperative society owned by its members, who are categorized into different classes based on share ownership.[/[‘p:}
All the members pay a onetime joining fee and annual support charges which depend on the class they belong to.
SWIFT charges its users for each message depending on the length and message type. These charges are also dependent on the bank’s usage volume. There are charge tiers existing for banks that generate different volume of messages.
Apart from these, SWIFT has introduced many additional features and services, such as business intelligence, reference data, compliance services that offer different sources of additional income.
