With cyber security concerns still on the rise, financial institutions should be at the forefront of mitigating risks associated with cyber fraud. A good way to do this is to supplement existing fraud controls by appealing to SWIFT Daily Validation Reports, a new fraud prevention service within SWIFT’s Financial Crime Compliance portfolio.
Since data accuracy is crucial when it comes to the payment activity stored locally, it’s important to be prepared against removal or destruction of transaction traces. What Daily Validation Reports do in this matter is provide an accurate overview based on SWIFT’s temporary copies and secure records of a bank’s financial messages sent & received over their network.
Daily Validation Reports help smaller financial institutions complement their existing fraud controls by validating payment transaction activity, highlighting potential risks, and responding quickly if fraud incidents occur. If suspicious activity is detected, they provide the information you need to help you cancel messages and recover funds, protecting you, your customers and your counter-parties.
Specifically, DVRs offer a daily aggregate view of a bank’s FIN flows, which helps to identify potential payment risks:
- Anomalies that are uncharacteristic and may be indicative of a fraud.
- Significant changes in payments messages activity compared to historical averages.
- Large and uncharacteristic aggregate behaviors.
It’s worth mentioning that all the reports and visuals are read-only, being created and maintained by SWIFT. However, they can be filtered by message type, currency country, or correspondent and they can be exported to PDF, Excel, and CSV.
Besides the activity reporting (with daily volume and value totals), DVRs also cover risk reporting by means of ordered lists of the top single transactions, top aggregate transactions for counterparties, as well as reports on new combinations of counterparties (BIC8). This way, financial institutions can validate, assess and review all their transactions.
Daily Validation Reports also help manage internal compliance investigations quickly and efficiently, facilitating risk reviews and ad-hoc investigation requests from correspondents.
To encourage the adoption of this fraud prevention tool, SWIFT is offering the Daily Validation Reports as a web-based service, eliminating the need of extra hardware or software installation, as well as other integration requirements. You can simply sign up and start downloading the reports from SWIFT’s secure, encrypted web portal. When it comes to spotting suspicious payment flows, always follow your best interest and go beyond mandatory!
As far as our health as individuals is concerned, it’s pretty clear that prevention is waaay better than treatment. Why ignore this priceless advice when it comes down to your business?
Get in touch with us today to find out more about Daily Validation Reports and what steps to take to reduce risks associated with cyber fraud.
*Allevo is SWIFT Business Partner. As part of this partnership Allevo promotes SWIFT product and service portfolio in Romania. The content of this blog post belongs to its author and does not reflect the official position of SWIFT.
Now that 2017 is coming to an end, let’s take a look at what it had in store for us:
A New Business Strategy
Early this year, together with our partners at TIAS School for Business and Society we refreshed our business strategy.
Please know that we have a deep customer intimate approach, while we aim to:
- achieve gradual growth
- remain independent
- diversify customer and solution portfolio
- nurture our team
- recruit talent that fits and expands our capabilities
Most importantly, we listen to needs of the customer and respond with a customized offering.
TOSS project launch
With help from the EU, as beneficiaries of the Competitiveness Operational Programme 2014-2020, we just embarked on a 2-year journey for developing an innovative open source solution for SMEs and corporate treasuries: FinOps Suite.
The full name of the project is “Treasure Open Source Software – TOSS innovative software development” and you can read more about the project features here and here.
A solution for PSD2 compliance
With the revised Payments Services Directive (PSD2) coming into effect in January 2018, and based on the valuable input from its banking clients, Allevo developed FinTP Connect, a software application for the centralized management of requests coming from TPPs (PISP/AISP) on behalf of the final customer.
Read more about it in our press release.
New FinTP feature for Instant Payments
FinTP Instant is a new FinTP functionality focused on processing messages supported by the upcoming Instant Payments services.
This will connect bank back-office systems to services offered by CSMs like TransFonD, retrieving payment instructions (in any format provided by these applications), converting them to the ISO 20022 standard and routing them as dictated by the scheme.
We start this implementation by accommodating the service offered by TransFonD on the local market, for RON payments.
Our first FMA customer in Moldova
Moldindconbank selected FMA, Allevo’s solution for mirroring SWIFT transactions between the production and backup platforms, ensuring business continuity, data integrity and consistency.
After being deemed “the most innovative bank in Moldova” for two years in a row, Moldindconbank now joins the banks in Romania that have opted for FMA in the past years, thus becoming Allevo’s first client in Moldova to have successfully implemented this solution.
Garanti Bank Romania implemented FinTP
Garanti Bank Romania selected FinTP, Allevo’s open source solution to connect to SWIFTNet, ensuring compliance to SEPA standards and regulations, in order to optimize its operations. The bank continues, as such, to grow rapidly on the Romanian market, offering better services to its customers.
By adopting FinTP, Garanti Bank Romania benefits from a technology that drives cost reduction and conveys full control over the source code of the application, thus eliminating the vendor lock-in dependence, while gaining access to a transparent product development process and transparent product audit.
Allevo User Group 30
On November 16, we organized the 30th edition of Allevo’s User Group Meeting.
With 2018 already knocking on all our doors, the User Group presentation started with a focus on Allevo’s projects – past and future, our partnership with SWIFT, as well as the solutions we provide for the newly-regulated financial environment (PSD2, Instant Payments, GDPR), and our renewed certifications (ISO 9001/2015 and ISO/IEC 27001:2013).
Our first international FinOps Suite conference
On October 26th, we put together in Chisinau the first international conference linked to our most recent project for SMEs and corporate treasuries: FinOps Suite.
A major focus of this conference was to extend the FINkers United community in Moldova and it brought on stage representatives of the main pillars of the financial and banking environment in both Romania and the Republic of Moldova.
Here’s everything you need to know about it!
On the panel of SWIFT Business Forum Romania
The 8th edition of SWIFT Business Forum Romania was organized by the Romanian Association of Banks on November 8th in Bucharest.
Gathering around 100 representatives from financial institutions, the conference was focused on celebrating 25 years of SWIFT in Romania, along with debating challenges and opportunities for the financial banking industry and compliance issues. The conference ended with a panel discussion on the inevitable digital transformation, a round table proudly joined. We presented the FinOps Suite project, the FinTP Connect proof of concept that addresses PSD2 compliance and the new feature of FinTP for processing Instant Payments (FinTP Instant).
Our insights from the conference can be found here.
Sibos Toronto
Our colleagues, Ioana and Mihai, represented Allevo at the world’s premier financial services event, and they delivered fresh insights on all major topics, like ISO 20022 implementation, open banking threats and opportunities, international payments, cyber risks and malicious insiders, global uncertainties in the financial industry, correspondent banking, instant payments, RegTech, banking APIs, disruption, innovation…
Check out our daily summaries from Sibos 2017!
Money20/20 Europe
After a bit of a hassle with a cancelled flight, Allevo managed to land in Copenhagen just in time for Money20/20 Europe, bringing you daily highlights as seen through our lens.
Among others, track sessions focused on case studies and provided insights on hot topics like alternate financing, algorithm-based innovation, legal and regulatory aspects, mobile payments, open banking, legacy systems, machine learning, user experience, cross-border disruption, as well as risk, security and fraud.
We’re looking forward to 2018, especially since we’re turning 20, woo-hoo!
In Romanian:
Pentru informatii detaliate despre celelalte programe cofinantate de Uniunea Europeana, va invitam sa vizitati www.fonduri-ue.ro. Continutul acestui material nu reprezinta in mod obligatoriu pozitia oficiala a Uniunii Europene sau a Guvernului Romaniei. Proiect finantat in cadrul POC, Axa prioritara 2, Acțiunea 2.1, Prioritate de investitii 2b. Cod MySMIS: 115724, Nr. Contract Finantare: 101/16.08.2017.
Community, innovation, collaboration – these have always been Allevo’s basic principles. So, it’s no surprise that we decided to partner with IT regional clusters whose primary goals are capitalizing on creativity and new technologies, supporting entrepreneurship initiatives, attracting investments, encouraging innovation, connecting to the global market and many more along these lines.
This is how Allevo joined the Innovative Regional Cluster EURONEST IT&C Hub, and became the proud beneficiary of an important European funding. More specifically, in August of this year, as a company operating in Romania within IT&C centered clusters, Allevo obtained European funds for a project focused on developing an innovative software solution for SMEs and corporate treasuries: FinOps Suite.
The project, by its full name “Treasure Open Source Software – TOSS innovative software development”, consists not only of the development of the aforementioned solution, but also of a benchmarking tool and an automated testing tool, as well as redesigning the website www.allevo.ro and expanding the FINkers United community.
By the time this project is completed, Allevo will be delivering innovative solutions for processing financial transactions to the members of the EURONEST cluster (21 founding members + 53 adhering members and the list is still open). These solutions will be distributed under the free open-source GPLv3 license. Why open-source? Because this has been Allevo’s business philosophy for years: we believe in progress through joint forces and resources.
Along these lines, back in 2014, we established the basis of a community centered on our first (and already implemented) open-source project, FinTP, which bears the pretty suggestive name of FINkers United – a playful abridgement for “financial thinkers”. The community’s main goal is to unify two important ecosystems – IT and banking – and it is open to IT specialists, business analysts and financial experts alike. The EURONEST cluster membership is an important first step towards growing FINkers United and we are confident that this is more of a guarantee than just a wish, over the two years to come.
In fact, the Competitiveness Operational Programme 2014-2020, which encompasses the co-funding that Allevo obtained for this project, supports the enhancement of the IT&C infrastructure and the development of innovation through clusters, which fits our purpose like a glove. Moreover, by developing a new open-source solution for SMEs and corporations (FinOps Suite), we’re adding another ecosystem to the original scheme, building a modern architecture which would connect them to the banks they are working with and, thus, giving them the chance to use the same technology.
A good sign already came from the EURONEST cluster last year when they announced that over 10% of the applications for Action 2.2.1 of the Programme belong to their members, Allevo’s project eventually being among the most convincing ones. We therefore embark on this journey with confidence that the interaction between specialists is furthermore consolidated, be they part of the member companies, public institutions, research institutes or academia.
In Romanian:
Pentru informatii detaliate despre celelalte programe cofinantate de Uniunea Europeana, va invitam sa vizitati www.fonduri-ue.ro. Continutul acestui material nu reprezinta in mod obligatoriu pozitia oficiala a Uniunii Europene sau a Guvernului Romaniei. Proiect finantat in cadrul POC, Axa prioritara 2, Acțiunea 2.1, Prioritate de investitii 2b. Cod MySMIS: 115724, Nr. Contract Finantare: 101/16.08.2017.
