The system Swift introduced this year to simplify corporate links to banks has attracted several big users, but one of them says the system will not be able to deliver the payment information that businesses need for some time.
General Electric Co., one of the first companies to test the Score system, says it has improved the process of wiring funds directly into any company's bank account but does not yet support the inclusion of information with these payments. As a result, senders must tell recipients why they are receiving the funds, GE said.
And though some agencies in the United States and in Europe are developing ways to include the information, nobody expects them to be ready anytime soon.
Score (short for Standardized Corporate Environment) went live in January and lets corporate users send funds to any bank through a single connection.
Paul S. Burstein, the managing director of operations services in General Electric's corporate treasury unit, said it has used Score to connect to 54 banks around the world and sends about 86,000 wires a month. However, the Fairfield, Conn., company must send a separate data file to recipients for every one of those wires.
Corporations will not see the full benefits of electronic payments until these files can be consolidated, he said. "That's the next step to solving the bigger problem."
Before introducing Score, the financial cooperative Swift, formally the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, required corporates to use separate connections to each bank to which they wanted to send payment messages.
As part of "phase one" of the ongoing Score conversion, GE plans to add another 50 banks to its network, he said.
GE is also working with banks, and payments organizations on "phase two," making its payments work with the Single Euro Payments Area system that is scheduled to go live in January.
Sepa is expected to create a continent-wide payment system using a standard known as ISO 20022.
Mr. Burstein said the standard does not meet corporate needs, because it applies only to bank-to-bank messages.
GE expects to participate in a working group to extend the standard to include payment information. Mr. Burstein said the group could be formed this quarter, though it would likely "take many, many years to implement."
A similar project in the United States appears to have fallen behind schedule. The Federal Reserve banks and The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC said in October that they wanted to developing a way to include information with wires, and that they were considering using either the 20022 standard or the EPN STP 820, a version of the electronic data interchange format. They said in April that they would decide by June which standard to use, but have not yet announced any progress. Calls to the Clearing House and the Fed banks last week and Monday were not returned.
Mr. Burstein and other payments executives spoke last week at a conference sponsored by the Chicago consulting firm Treasury Strategies Inc. Executives from Microsoft Corp. and E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., detailed their Swift implementation plans.
Ed Barrie, the group manager for treasury at Microsoft, said that the software giant has used Score to connect to 11 banks that have 300 of his company's accounts, but that it is focusing initially on its own daily cash-balance reporting.
Larry Boyer, the global treasury information technology manager at DuPont, said his company has replaced several payments systems with a single one that eventually will connect its three global treasury centers to more than 100 banks in the 70 countries where DuPont does business."
