5 Key Factors to consider before implementing Your SWIFT Project

Payment Components have been advising financial institutions, banks and software companies for over eight years, with regards to their SWIFT financial messaging solution provider needs and we are often asked by clients; What are the key architectural factors to consider before implementing their SWIFT related project?

And as we believe that every financial institution, bank and software company should have a thorough understanding of each of the architectural factors they need to consider, before implementing a SWIFT related project, we have set these out in this article.

The 5 Key Architectural Factors You Should Consider Before Implementing a SWIFT Related Project

1. Recruit the right longterm team

You will need to ensure you have analysts that understand and are prepared to dig deep into the SWIFT rule books, understand the relevant message flows and follow up on these each year as they are updated.

2. Don’t lose your key SWIFT talent

It will take deep domain knowledge of SWIFT libraries and your particular business needs to provide and longterm manage your SWIFT related project successfully, so relying on a small internal team or individual will risk leaving your organization very exposed, if a team member leaves your organization.

3. Relational databases are not always the right choice

SWIFT messages substantially differ from each other. And there is no relational schema that will accommodate them all. You can of course design a generic model (Tag, Value, etc), but you are going to experience performance problems when trying to fetch them. So, we would advise that you consider another option such as NoSQL databases.

4. Focus on making your application remarkable

Is spending a considerable level of your organization’s internal resources understanding, building and validating cumbersome SWIFT messages, the best investment? You might consider partnering with a specialist, third party SWIFT libraries provider instead, which would enable your internal team’s resources to be deployed on making your application remarkable, instead.

5. The SWIFT application journey is infinite

Once your SWIFT related project is implemented, you will need to factor in potential annual updates following the issuing of new SWIFT guidelines. Meaning you will need to assign a specialist role to someone to follow these updates and ensure they possess the necessary development capabilities to implement without affecting the live application(s). Consequently, it is advisable to decouple validation from the message creation having an industry strength and guaranteed implementation either as first or second level validation of the messages your application creates will provide an additional layer of security and compliance.

Conclusion

If you represent a financial institution, bank or software company and are considering the implementation of a SWIFT application, I hope considering these five key factors will help you ensure your SWIFT application is implemented successfully for today and for your organization's future SWIFT messaging requirements. And of course Payment Components would be delighted to help you ensure each of these key factors is accounted for and provide you with a comprehensive quotation for your specific SWIFT financial messaging project.