Norwegian software vendor Commercial Banking Applications AS (CBA), today announced that Landsbankinn in Iceland is benefitting from the seamless integration of Swift’s Transaction Screening Service (TSS) with CBA’s IBAS GBF - Global Banking Factory – which the bank uses to run its banking operations in payments and trade finance.

The integration with Swift TSS ensures that all incoming and outgoing messages, independent of banking product, are screened in real-time against the most up-to-date sanctions lists during IBAS business processing. Bank users are instantly alerted if anything suspicious is detected.

“We’re using Swift’s TSS functionality as part of our transaction processing within IBAS, to improve alert quality and accuracy in sanction screening and also to reduce the number of false positives being handled by our operations staff,” explained Audur Bjarnadottir, Head of International Payment in Landsbankinn.  “The CBA team has made the integration with Swift TSS very smooth, allowing us to benefit from automatic transaction screening in real-time. This all happens as a workflow during the real-time processing of business events in IBAS GBF. The integration helps us to focus on the quality of all transactions, while delivering efficiency savings and reducing the time spent on manual tasks.”

IBAS GBF enables all message types, including payments, trade finance and other banking transactions, to be scanned in real-time via Swift TSS whether these originate as MT messages, or in ISO-compliant MX or SEPA format. The integration uses REST APIs and the IBAS CLL (call) framework, enabling sanction screening to be automatically executed. IBAS GBF also automates all follow up actions, enabling transactions that pass the screening process to pass straight through, while those identified as potential hits are held and automatically flagged for further investigation.

“By connecting our customers to Swift’s Transaction Screening Service, we’re giving them direct access to a fully-managed and securely-hosted service that is continually updated with the latest sanctions data,” said Rolf Hauge, CEO and founder, CBA. “The ability to halt any suspicious transactions in real time is vital in an age of instant banking. The alternative, for those banks unable to scan transactions in real time as part of their ordinary business processing, can be a lot of manual work in recalling transactions if issues are subsequently found. We’re delighted that Landsbankinn is already benefitting from the efficiencies and quality of using the service and look forward to rolling it out to other IBAS customers in due course.”

The use of ISO 20022 CBPR+ is also expected to deliver significant benefits in reducing false positives.  According to a recent eBook from Swift: Supercharge-your-payments-business-with-iso-20022, in practice, some 5-10% of payments generate an alert and industry figures suggest that of those alerts, 99% are false positives. ISO 20022 CBPR+ addresses the challenge by providing distinct, well-defined data elements in clear structures, as well as including more elements and more space than existing standards.  With a more targeted approach to screening, it’s estimated that financial institutions could reduce false positives by 25-30%.