Q. How is Swift’s Sanctions Screening service progressing and could there be similar initiatives for other areas of compliance?
A. We started this in April 2012 as a service particularly for smaller banks. They can choose to have their traffic screened and be informed of any hits. It is going quite well and we are signing up a lot of institutions. We will likely be offering the service to larger institutions but also adding other flows such as non-Swift messages and other kinds of traffic. We have added a service called sanctions testing, which is essentially a batch of messages with a diagnostic tool. You feed that through your sanctions filters and it allows you to tell if they are properly calibrated.
