What’s new?

Cross Border Payment Security

by | Jan 3, 2019

Payment fraud is on the increase and hardly a day goes by without reports of the latest scam to hit the headlines. Sometimes it’s based on a simple lack of internal control somewhere in the payment process but increasingly payment fraud is more sophisticated and often involves some form of cyber related crime, or the use of techniques to distort the voice. Many large corporate treasuries still process cross border payments manually, often using partner banks’ electronic banking systems to generate the payment instruction. Not only can this be extremely time consuming but using multiple electronic banking systems is an outdated, and often expensive, way of achieving connectivity.

Becoming a corporate member of the SWIFT network may be the answer. A growing number of large corporates are moving into more efficient and secure payment methods, using SWIFT to settle all payments, not just those related to Treasury activities, and frequently accessing the network using some form of treasury technology.

Recently, SWIFT has introduced its “Global Payments Initiative” (GPI), which aims to provide additional benefits to its existing payment services, focusing on payment security as well as improved payment processing, by:

• Enabling beneficiaries to be credited in minutes
• Allowing end to end tracking of payments including confirmation that funds have been credited to the beneficiary’s account
• Providing transparency on bank charges & exchange rates
• Ensuring remittance data remains unchanged