Swift estimates that adopting Case Management early could help the financial industry save more than $600 million each year in operational and liquidity expenses, while also potentially increasing gross revenue by 3–5%.
Financial cooperative Swift has recently introduced an enhanced Case Management service to help the financial industry overcome obstacles and inefficiencies in processing exceptions and investigations (E&I).
The solution is built on ISO 20022 standard and leverages the industry-wide unique end-to-end transaction reference (UETR) for payment instruction messages to quickly discover the reasons and circumstances of the payment delay.
Additionally, the tool features intelligent routing, automated reminders and replies, and comprehensive tracking to help institutions reduce time and costs associated with handling investigations, while enabling them to focus on higher-value business activities. The enhanced Case Management also illustrates some features of smart AI-driven support, like auto-suggesting next actions or identifying root causes, to speed up investigations.
The upgraded service significantly surpasses the capabilities of its earlier versions, which were limited to manual or semi-automated routing of cases between institutions, manual follow-ups and response processes, limited visibility across the entire investigation lifecycle, reduced use of structured data formats, outdated UI and workflow, etc.
The latest upgrades can potentially reduce manual effort by up to 80%, improve response times, and help financial institutions cut operational costs and boost customer satisfaction. Using data from the in-depth industry research, Swift estimated that its upgraded Case Management tool could save the industry more than $600 million a year out of over $1.6 billion a year financial institutions spend on manual work to investigate delayed payments.
Statistics say that despite cross-border payments getting faster, for instance, 90% of SWIFT payments now reach the end bank within an hour and are processed automatically, delays still happen if key info is missing. Moreover, delays happen no matter what system or network is used. Fixing these inconsistencies can take 5 to 10 business days. While payment settlement times have decreased by about four times since 2019, the time taken to resolve payment delay investigations remains unchanged. Some large banks pay over $20 million annually just in fees and penalties for such delayed payments.
Case Management is one of several tools SWIFT offers to reduce issues in cross-border payments, in pursuit of the G20’s goals for better international transactions. More than 30 major financial institutions have successfully tested the new version. It’s now available to all members of the global SWIFT network.
Earlier, SWIFT network launched an AI-powered solution to bolster fraud detection in cross-border payments, analyse vast amounts of real-time payment data, and mitigate risks.
