SWIFT Turns Securities Traffic Data into Valuable Business Insights

SWIFT has launched Watch for Securities, a business intelligence solution, which helps securities market participants to monitor and gain useful business insights from their network traffic.

Following a previously successful early adopter programme, SWIFT’s Watch for Securities is now ready for full-scale usage by investment banks, local and global custodians, broker/dealers and asset managers.

The new solution builds on SWIFT’s existing business intelligence portfolio, which has traditionally focused on payments. Watch for Securities covers corporate and settlement action flows, primarily used to enable cross-border transactions between investment banks, global custodians and their counterparties, including asset managers and local agents.

Watch for Securities also supplies securities market players with independent and monthly aggregated global traffic information, which enables participating financial institutions to obtain data from several proprietary systems and locations, without spending time gathering such information independently. The analytics made available also allow financial institutions to measure and benchmark their own activities against the collective market activity on SWIFT, which is segregated by client type.

“With massive amounts of unstructured data available, many financial institutions need to find new ways to turn data into meaningful business insights… We are pleased to evolve and extend this service to our securities customers, particularly in the areas of corporate actions processing and settlement services,” says Stephen Gilderdale, head of new business development at SWIFT.

“Through Watch for Securities customers can obtain valuable insights into how securities markets are evolving, and their share of activity in particular markets. The tool also measures the relative efficiency of a customer’s operations against the market as a whole,” adds Fabian Vandendreydt, head of markets management, innotribe and the SWIFT Institute at SWIFT.