As an early adopter of SWIFT’s MyStandards and Readiness Portal, Citi is helping its institutional clients go to market faster with streamlined testing that reduce implementation risk and costs.

SWIFT’s MyStandards is a service which has been designed and developed with the guidance and insight from Citi and other firms. With MyStandards, Citi can create and share messaging guidelines in one place, allowing internal users and clients to view and test against Citi guidelines. This results in a much improved service experience as Citi’s clients can accelerate the onboarding process and can respond faster to new market developments.

The Readiness Portal enables Citi’s clients and partners to validate test files and messages online and receive instant feedback. This ability to perform tests anytime from anywhere helps accelerate projects and standards adoption.

Combined use of MyStandards and the Readiness Portal allows Citi to disseminate information to clients more quickly and it allows clients to test their own messages against Citi guidelines in MyStandards and SWIFT Network Validation Rules to ensure inbound messages meet Citi's requirements. This helps accelerate both standards maintenance and bank integration projects by supporting format validations tests online and provide instant feedback.

Citi has completed several successful projects with its clients using the SWIFT MyStandards and Readiness Portal. Here are some examples:

Northern Trust Company
Charles J. LeBrun, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Payments Services, Foreign Exchange and Treasury Operations, Northern Trust Company said “MyStandards and the Readiness Portal make a powerful global standards and market practice management tool to help mitigate risk and reduce cost of the annual maintenance release. Citi’s adoption of MyStandards and the Readiness Portal highlight Citi’s commitment to helping Northern Trust and their other clients control risk and cost by active leadership in critical Market Practice and Standards. From a Trade Settlement and Reconciliation perspective, speed and accuracy is a priority for us at Northern Trust. Having access to Citi’s published standards and the ability to test against them minimizes the risk of failing settlements in markets supported by Citi.”

British Council
“We had a very ambitious project at British Council - complete bank integration for nine countries in less than three months. Citi’s support of SWIFT’s MyStandards proved to be a highly efficient solution for the British Council,” said Richard Symonds, Treasury Operations Manager, British Council. “With our developers having online access to Citi’s payment and formatting rules, development and testing was very rapid. As a result, our first test files sent to Citi were processed without issues and we completed the project on time.”

SAXO Bank
“Citi’s adoption of MyStandards made Saxo Bank planning for the 2015 maintenance release easier by providing the information on Citi’s changes earlier, providing our teams two months more than normal to plan our changes. Using MyStandards was a real value-add for testing SWIFT messages well ahead before releasing it to market. This gave us an edge to test SWIFT standards across 18 markets, which couldn’t have been possible without MyStandards. Testing SWIFT standards with MyStandards was very intuitive and easy, making both the test team and UAT team comfortable using it; the entire team used the same as a SWIFT Bible. The Testing team gained a lot of confidence before releasing the product to market,” said Siddharth Gupta, Senior Manager, Saxo Bank.
MyStandards and the Readiness Portal are being leveraged for Securities, Funds Services, Treasury, and Trade provided by Citi around the globe. The markets standards supported include ISO 20022 and the MT messages.

“Citi’s adoption of MyStandards and the Readiness Portal was made easy by the streamlined workflow and SWIFT’s strong partnership,” stated Brian Crabtree, Director, Market Practice, Standards and SWIFT at Citi. “Citi’s participation in the closed user group in the early stages of MyStandards and continued participation in the user group that now runs enables Citi to put forward ideas on how the product should be developed, sharing experiences through the use of the two applications. The toolset has shown to be both instrumental in internal projects as well as with client and partner engagements. This is a great example of collective innovation with a strong partner for the benefit of our clients.”

Marc Delbaere Head of MyStandards at SWIFT commented, “Citi has really raised the bar for us in driving the platform requirements from the very beginning. This has been a fantastic collaboration and we are extremely happy to see the breadth of their roll-out.”