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.