A new study by Deloitte Treasury Advisory Services sheds light on how corporates can benefit from a single, cost-effective, and highly secure window to communicate with all their banking partners through direct integration with SWIFT. This report was written by Kishore Gollakota and Isaac Kahara and claims to separate fact from fiction covering:

• Benefits of using SWIFT as the single window to the banking partners
• Options for connecting to the SWIFT network
• Costs of implementation and integration considering both internal and external factors.

Connecting to Swift 

There are basically four options for corporates connecting to Swift:

Source & Copyright©2019 - Deloitte Belgium

The costs

 The report examines various aspects of each of the four solutions, summarised here:

Source & Copyright©2019 - Deloitte Belgium

They found many customers who like the Swift solution, e.g. “It is all about data. Thanks to SWIFT, we only spend about 15 minutes a day to gather the bank account information globally across five banks and 60 bank accounts.”

Debunking the myths

The myths debunked include:

• SWIFT is for very large corporations: 32% of SWIFT corporate users have an annual revenue < 1bn USD, of which 21% have revenue of less than 0,5 bn USD
• SWIFT requires heavy investment in IT infrastructure: most corporates are opting for the cloud solution
• Only need SWIFT connectivity if you have many banking partners: the majority of corporates (56%) on SWIFT are connected to ten or fewer banks. A smaller portion (28%) interact with less than five banks.

---

CTMfile take: Really useful report. A must for any corporate considering using the Swift network.