Singapore, 3 May 2025 – Swift has launched an enhanced version of its Case Management service aimed at tackling a long-standing operational inefficiency in cross-border payments: the high cost and time involved in investigating delayed transactions.
The global financial industry is estimated to spend over USD 1.6 billion annually on manually resolving payment delays, with some major institutions absorbing more than USD 20 million each in penalties and investigation-related costs. Swift’s improved platform, designed to be network-agnostic, offers a potential USD 600 million in annual cost savings and could accelerate resolution times by up to 80%.
The solution leverages ISO 20022 data standards and Unique End-to-End Transaction References (UETRs) to create transparency and streamline communication across financial institutions. By capturing investigation data centrally and eliminating manual back-and-forth between institutions, it enables more efficient case handling — regardless of which payment network is used.
While 90% of transactions over Swift reach end banks within an hour, delays can still occur due to missing or incomplete information. These delays typically require five to ten business days to resolve, consuming resources and frustrating customers.
“Inefficient investigations processes are impacting the industry greatly in terms of cost and time and drastically affecting the customer experience,” said Shirish Wadivkar, Global Head of Transaction Management at Swift. “Our enhanced solution addresses the main pain points in investigating incidents, helping our community make gains in efficiency, time, and costs to provide the experience that customers expect. It’s not only a great example of how the ISO 20022 standard can help our industry deliver better user experience by removing friction and providing transparency, but is also a case in point as to how Swift is committed to interoperating an increasingly complex financial ecosystem by extending the benefits of our solutions across networks.”
The upgraded Case Management tool is now available to all Swift customers and has already been piloted by over 30 financial institutions worldwide. It forms part of Swift’s broader suite of services designed to support frictionless, real-time cross-border payments, in line with the G20’s roadmap.
Financial leaders testing the system have highlighted the tangible value:
“We understand how critical real-time transparency is for our clients during payment investigations, and we continue to expect our clients to hold us to the highest standards when it comes to providing that transparency. A centralised tool will be a key step in enhancing the payment investigations process and creating operational costs efficiencies, while ultimately also improving overall client satisfaction and increasing the value we bring as a solution provider,” said Isabel Schmidt, Executive Platform Owner, Enterprise Payments, at BNY.
Juan Olaizola, CEO of PagoNxt Payments Hub, a Santander Company, added: “With faster resolution times and greater transparency into the status of investigations, we can significantly enhance our customers’ experience. In turn, a better and more efficient management of payment incidents, will help reduce both our liquidity and operational costs. It’s a virtuous circle where everyone stands to benefit.”
Larize Nel, Head Payment External Gateways at ABSA, noted: “This solution truly simplifies and optimises the world of investigations. Through the orchestration capabilities it delivers data quality, speed, and accuracy. Deeply underpinned is the value this will deliver to our customers. This is significant progress towards frictionless payments.”
