Treasury Technology
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Leading Corporations are Adopting SWIFT

An Interview with Tom Durkin, Global Head of Integrated Channels, Bank of America Merrill Lynch

In this month’s Executive Interview, Helen Sanders, Editor, talks to Tom Durkin, Global Head of Integrated Channels at Bank of America Merrill Lynch about the opportunities that SWIFT offers for efficient, secure corporate-to-bank communication. Tom is joined by Sundeep Singh, Bank Technology Consultant at Cargill, who describes Cargill’s SWIFT implementation and some of the outcomes so far (see page 2 of this article).

What trends are you seeing in the use of SWIFT amongst your corporate clients?

Tom Durkin

While the ability for corporates to communicate with their banks via SWIFT has existed for well over a decade, it was generally only been the global multinationals with tens or even hundreds of banking providers that first took advantage of this opportunity. This started to change with the growth of service bureaus that provided outsourced SWIFT connectivity services, and more recently with the advent of SWIFT AllianceLite2, SWIFT’s cloud-based connectivity offering. Pricing models have also evolved, making SWIFT a more realistic connectivity proposition for a wider spectrum of organisations. For example, as mid-cap companies expand their geographic reach, they often need to expand the number of banks and manage counterparty risk more effectively, which makes the value proposition of SWIFT more compelling. There are now around 1,500 corporations using SWIFT for bank connectivity, but there is still enormous untapped potential amongst both large and mid-cap corporations.