Six More Banks Collaborate with SWIFT on KYC Utility

SWIFT has added six more banks—Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Erste Group, HSBC, ING and Raiffeisen Bank International—to jointly develop its Know Your Customer (KYC) Registry, bringing the total number of collaborative banks up to 12.
By Jake Safane(2147484770)
SWIFT has added six more banks—Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Erste Group, HSBC, ING and Raiffeisen Bank International—to jointly develop its Know Your Customer (KYC) Registry, bringing the total number of collaborative banks up to 12.

These banks join Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Commerzbank, J.P.Morgan, Societe Generale and Standard Chartered to help develop a centralized repository that correspondent banks can use for their due diligence processes.

“Collaboration is playing a major role in the development of this industry-driven initiative. Banks want to collectively address the challenges around KYC compliance and SWIFT is well placed to help. We are receiving tremendous support from the banking community and are making great progress delivering a tool the industry needs to better support KYC compliance for correspondent banking,” says Luc Meurant, head of Banking Markets and Compliance Services at SWIFT.

SWIFT says that the banks have been working with SWIFT to agree on the utility’s processes, documentation and data for KYC requirements. Some of the banks are already populating the registry with their own relevant KYC information, while users are testing the platform as well. In September, SWIFT says an additional group of major banks will begin contributing their company data, so the registry will have significant information populated when it goes live at the end of this year.

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