The global financial cooperative Swift announced Wednesday that its new corporate access model is commercially available, following a three-month pilot.
Swift, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, said the access model, called Score (for Standardised Corporate Environment), would help large multinational companies that want to use the SwiftNet network to transmit financial instructions and other messages to more than one bank. Swift's members approved the new model last June.
Under the Belgian co-op's prior access models - Member Administered-Closed User Groups, authorized in 2001, and the Treasury Counterparty program, set up in 1998 - a corporate user is sponsored by, and connects to, a single bank. But those approaches, which remain available, proved unwieldy for companies that sought to connect to numerous banks. Only 175 corporations connect today over SwiftNet to the 7,800 financial institutions that Swift serves in 200 countries.
Pilot participants included seven corporations - General Electric Co., Microsoft Corp., the French manufacturer Alstom, the natural gas utility Gaz de France, the French dairy company Group Danone, the Luxembourg steel maker Arcelor Mittal, and Ciba Specialty Chemical Holdings Inc. - and 12 banking companies: ABN Amro Holding NV, Bank of America Corp., Barclays PLC, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, ING Group NV, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Nordea Group, Societe Generale AG, and UBS AG.
Score is focusing on cash management and treasury; Swift said it plans to add exceptions and investigations, trade services, and investment services, among other things.
