Typically banks and corporates have experienced challenges when on-boarding host-to-host or SWIFT channels, particularly when they include use of new and different standards such as ISO 20022. The client on-boarding process can be resource intensive with multiple interactions required between the bank/s, the corporate and potentially a third party supporting the client for message testing – typically facilitated by telephone, conference calls and email.

New workflow management tool

Barclays and Navigators Insurance have used the MyStandards new workflow management tool to simplify the SWIFT onboarding and testing processes. The workflow management tool - see figure below- enables banks and their corporate client to speed up the implementation of SWIFT Corporate Access and ISO 20022 by understanding their progress across the whole on-boarding process.

MyStandards Readiness Portal  – on-boarding flow

Source & Copyright©2015 - SWIFT 

Navigators Insurance and Barclays could see their overall progress, as shown by screen below:
Source & Copyright©2015 - SWIFT 

The result

Navigators successfully implemented its connectivity to SWIFT via Kyriba and its on-boarding with Barclays in a few short months. With MyStandards, Navigators completed user acceptance testing with Barclays and Kyriba in four weeks over the year-end holiday period when staffing levels were not at full capacity. 

Today Barclays has fully integrated MyStandards into its Business as Usual (BAU) process for any client on-boarding around a host-to-host or the SWIFT channel space. The bank is experiencing significantly faster implementation cycles, upwards of 70%, which is enabling Barclays to onboard more clients quickly and lighten the workload for its SMEs.

SWIFT MyStandards strategy and impact

The aim of the MyStandards group in SWIFT is to, as Marc Delbaere - Head of MyStandards - puts it, “To simplify the understanding of messaging formats across the industry by offering a standard way for the banks to document their differences.”

For example, in a payment initiation message (pain.001), a bank might mandate the presence of creditor information in the credit transfer transaction information sequence while the rest of the market would keep it optional. Such a difference is immediately obvious in MyStandards for any corporate that wants to communicate with that bank.

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CTMfile take: The MyStandards workflow platform is really starting to deliver and the ‘standardising the way the banks document the differences in how they use the standards’ is vital. It removes a major obstacle for corporates connecting to banks on SWIFT.