UBF and SWIFT meeting discusses UAE banking standards

ABU DHABI: UAE Banks Federation (UBF) in association with SWIFT, the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services, on Saturday held the SWIFT User Group meeting in Abu Dhabi. The meeting brought together 100 senior banking experts to discuss the latest SWIFT updates relevant to the UAE banking sector.

Commenting on the SWIFT User Group Meeting, Abdulaziz Al Ghurair, Chairman of UBF, said: “The UBF’S close collaboration with SWIFT, the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services, underpins our commitment to further elevate standards across the UAE banking sector. We have a responsibility to ensure our member banks are up to date with the latest developments, and our networks across the financial ecosystem are reliable, safe and secure. By bringing key stakeholders together and providing a knowledge-sharing platform, we can successfully facilitate the exchange of ideas while staying up to date with the ever-changing banking landscape.”

Onur Ozan, Head of Middle East, North Africa and Turkey at SWIFT, added: “SWIFT sits at the heart of the financial industry. We have close relationships and maintain a strong dialogue with our community. This collaboration helps us understand the financial sector’s challenges and opportunities and deliver solutions for a rapidly changing and increasingly complex business environment. We continue working together with UBF, to keep our User Community in the UAE abreast of the latest trends and product developments.”

The roll out of ‘Universal Confirmations’ over SWIFT was discussed at the meeting. By end 2020, it will be mandatory for all financial institutions receiving cross-border payments( mt 103 messages) to confirm when a payment has been credited to the account of the beneficiary. End-to-end tracking and confirmation of credit will enable financial institutions to provide an enhanced experience to customers and serve as the building blocks for developing future payment services.

The meeting also covered a variety of other topics including the Alliance Family - the set of products that SWIFT offers to the banking industry which are used to connect to SWIFT networks; Relationship Management Applications (RMA); and the SWIFT Customer Security Program.