The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication has finished testing one system for processing corporate information, and announced a test for another.
The global financial cooperative, known as Swift, said Tuesday during its 2006 Sibos conference in Sydney that it plans to test a way for large corporations to communicate with multiple banking companies through a single SwiftNet connection.
On Wednesday, Swift announced that it has completed a test of a “trade services utility,” and that 18 banking companies have signed up to offer it to their corporate clients.
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 will participate in the multibank connection test, expected to start in January.
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. also will participate, Swift said.
The fact that businesses now can communicate with only one bank at a time, through bank-centric member administered-closed user groups, makes it difficult for companies to receive real-time information about their global financial position. GE, for example, belongs to 21 different groups.
In June, Swift members voted to allow the multibank connection, which the cooperative is calling Score (for “standardized corporate environment.”)
Swift said the test would focus initially on cash management and treasury services, though other functions, such as exceptions and investigations, trade services, and securities services, likely will be available later.
Also at the conference, JPMorgan Chase said that it is ready to offer the trade services utility now, as part of its purchase order management suite, and that it would offer its system to other banking companies on a white-label basis.
The Swift utility is designed to help banks’ customers manage receivables and payables more accurately when they are involved in open account trading across national borders. The utility provides an automated system for matching purchase orders, invoices, bills of lading, and other documents.
The cooperative said that 19 banking companies tested the utility, starting in February, but it did not set a date for delivering “a commercially sustainable offering” to the market.
