Banks and corporates will soon be able to exchange trade information over SWIFT, including, from November 2008, Letters of Credit advice and applications. The move follows the SWIFT Board decision on 10 June to extend the SCORE (Standardised CORporate Environment) participant model to include trade messaging, for the first time.
SWIFTs FIN message type (MT) 798 the “envelope message” p can carry the information a corporate needs to exchange with its bank.
The message caters for Import Letters of Credit, Export Letters of Credit and Guarantees/Standby Letters of Credit. A set of guidelines will detail how to use the message. The guidelines are the result of close collaboration with the national trade working groups, banks, corporates, vendors and the German banking community (whose national corporate to bank standard has been in use since 1998).
Where the MT 798 is not applicable, banks and corporates can use the FileAct messaging service with specific trade request types. The trade request types enable parties to identify files in a more formalised manner, thus improving routing, processing and overall efficiency.
“SWIFT is moving towards meeting community needs in the trade space,” says Arthur Cousins, director strategy and product development for the Standard Bank of South Africa and a member of the SWIFT Board. “This represents a major step forward for banks, to provide a complete trade offering to their corporate customers. We are very pleased with the industrys response to our efforts, such as ISOs recent approval of TSU related trade messages. Banks, corporates and vendors are spending serious time evaluating our proposals their contributions are essential to SWIFTs success.”