Thirteen trade banks have signed up to pilot the SwiftNet Trade Services Utility (TSU). They are ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Calyon, Citigroup, Deutsche, First Rand Bank, HSBC Group, JPMorgan Chase, KBC, The Royal Bank of Scotland, San Paolo IMI, Standard Bank of South Africa and The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

The new Swift Solution involves Swift looking beyond its focus on collections and documentary credits.

Functionality

The TSU is designed to allow banks to increase revenues and share the costs of providing services such as the insourcing of payables and receivables, finance and risk mitigation, the insourcing of trade data checking and management information.

SWIFT will pilot the TSU from December 2005 and launch is anticipated for mid-2006.

Pilot prospects

More banks are expected to join the pilot programme. According to Swift these could include the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation and UFJ Bank, which were members of the Trade Services Advisory Group (TSAG) set up by Swift in 2003 to review the co-operative's trade services strategy.

That group recommended that Swift expand its focus on collections and documentary credits to support banks' full range of supply chain services.

Banking solution

The SwiftNet TSU was developed as a result of meetings with the TSAG and other major trade banks from the Swift community. Over 20 banks were involved and a prototype was successfully tested in August 2004 to gain practical input on functionality for a commercial solution.

The SwiftNet TSU is based on Bolero's technology platform. Swift says the TSU is an independent, complementary and non-competitive service to Bolero's offering, since it is a bank-centric solution with no direct corporate access.

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