Tieto Offers Compliance to Wolfsberg Initiative
International pressure to provide more transparency, particularly in payment traffic, is continually increasing and the question being discussed worldwide is how banking transactions based on cover payments can be processed without financial institutions being suspected of money laundering and financing terrorism. The 12 globally active banks comprising the Wolfsberg Group have endorsed payment traffic standards to address and solve the issue.
Tieto is offering a solution to the market that is designed to enable banks – whether operating as ordering bank, beneficiary bank or correspondent bank – to comply with the new requirements. The solution from Tieto addresses issues related to:
The company says that the solution will reduce settlement risk and manual work for the banks as it performs matching of MT103(+) with cover messages MT202COV (as well as other cover messages – MT202 / MT910). All this is to ensure that the beneficiary customer is paid only when the bank has received a notification that settlement of cover transactions is confirmed OK.
Tieto also offers an integrated solution for the screening of payments and cover messages vs. blacklists or sanction lists to ensure that no payment in the payment chain is tampered with and to ensure that no party in the payment is present on any such list.
The solution will allow banks to comply with the commitments from the Wolfsberg initiative and the new SWIFT standard release November 2009 – in time and with minimal impact on existing application environment in the bank.
In short, the solution can perform automatic generation of correct MT202COV (or MT205COV), from pairing information in the original MT202 and MT103(+), as well as stripping MT202COV into standard MT202 on the correspondent bank side. For turn-around payments, the stripped information will be added on its way out.