SWIFT, the financial messaging provider, selected Sword FircoSoft to provide components of its new centralised Sanctions Screening service.

Economic sanctions are growing in importance as a tool to fight financial crime. As a consequence, complying with evolving sanctions regulations and frequently updated lists has become more complex, costly, and time-consuming for financial institutions.

Sanctions Screening over SWIFT will combine Sword FircoSoft’s filtering application and list update service with security and resilience capabilities of SWIFT, to provide a comprehensive and centralised screening service for small- and medium-sized financial institutions in need of a way to comply with sanctions regulation.

Users of the new Sanctions Screening service will be able to request selected SWIFT FIN messages be routed to the centralised screening application, where they will be filtered in real time, and checked against customers’ selected sanctions lists. If there is no match to the sanctions list, the message will be delivered as usual. If there is a match, customers will be asked to instruct SWIFT as to whether to release, abort, or flag the message via an alert management system.

The new service is scheduled to go live in late 2011.

For more information:
http://www.swift.com/news/press_releases/sanctions_screening