Swift Securities View launched in January this year, following a pilot run last year with ABN Amro Clearing and Japan’s Nomura Asset Management. Now, Swift claims that 34 of the world’s leading financial institutions, including BNY Mellon, Credit Suisse, and HSBC Securities Services, have already signed up for the service.
According to Swift, these 34 institutions collectively represent more than 630 million securities transactions per year. Swift Securities View could contribute to the reduction of settlement fails, which cost the industry approximately US$3 billion a year.
As explained in this article, the system uses unique transaction identifiers (UTI), which are part of the emerging ISO 20022 standard, to make it possible to monitor the status of trades through all steps of the settlement cycle. The UTIs allow all Swift messages in the same securities settlement flow to link up in a transaction chain, giving all participants access to automated tracking on both sides of the transaction.
In Swift’s words, the service was designed to “bring a new level of transparency to post-trade processing” and to “quickly identify trades at risk of failing so that they (financial institutions) can take preemptive action”.