Bank Muscat wins Citibank award for error-free fund transfers
MUSCAT: Bank Muscat, the leading financial services provider in the Sultanate, was awarded by Citibank for its operational excellence in the field of dollar payments processing. Bank Muscat won the Straight-through-processing (STP) award by Citibank for outstanding performance in dollar-denominated fund transfers.
The award recognised Bank Muscat’s exceptional quality of SWIFT messages on dollar payments and maintaining an outstanding error-free rate for remittances. The award was based on evaluation of the quality and accuracy of SWIFT payment messages routed through Citibank, which was as high as 99.19% in the MT103 category.
The award highlighted the bank’s commitment to high standards of quality in meeting the stringent criteria for fund transfer. The bank’s exceptional quality in the delivery of commercial payments and transfers, facilitated by a state-of-theart in-house payment architecture, which helps to consistently maintain high SWIFT standards for automated processing throughout the payment chain, was also acknowledged.
The bank’s Central Operations electronic payments department, Treasury back office and Global Trade Services department handle fund transfer operations while the technical and security issues are handled by the Systems and Procedures department. The Global Financial Institutions department reckoned as one of the leading FI teams in the region, has established more than 500 correspondent banking relationships across the world. Citibank is among Bank Muscat’s most prominent correspondent banks for dollar payments. Citibank representatives commended the operational teams involved in processing dollar payments at Bank Muscat for the error-free rate, which was maintained consistently throughout the year.
A multi-award winning organisation, Bank Muscat’s STP performance has been consistently lauded by the international financial and banking community for several years, with the bank winning a similar award from JP Morgan Chase recently.