Swift Alliance Lite Introduction Fuels BIC and BEI Expansion

Brussels - Following its September launch of Alliance Lite, an offering aimed at enabling smaller firms to use Swift messaging for payments, interbank payment utility Swift has seen an expansion of Bank Identifier Codes (BIC) and Bank Entity Identifiers (BEIs), which will make the standards more valuable to the community, officials tell Inside Reference Data.

Alliance Lite, an easy-to install, low-cost connectivity option, means Swift is reaching a new segment of the market, small-volume financial institutions and corporates, that previously were not part of the Swift network. When these firms join Swift, they are assigned the standard identification codes BICs and BEIs to facilitate automation.

Peter Vanderauwera, product director innovation at Swift, says the introduction of Alliance Lite has already had an impact on the BIC Directory. More than 30 new customers have ordered the product, and are either live or intend to be very shortly. "Alliance Lite has helped Swift significantly reduce the time it takes to enroll regulated financial institutions and have their BICs included in the Swift BIC Directory," he says.

In 2009, Swift expects several hundred customers to sign up for Alliance Lite, all of whom will receive a BIC code and access to the Swift community, according to Vanderauwera.

The BIC code, assigned to all firms that join the Swift network, is one of the benefits of using Swift. "An Alliance Lite customer is able to connect to Swift's international community of financial service providers and start using the assigned BIC to exchange standardized financial instructions," says Vanderauwera, adding that the BIC code and access to the online BIC Directory is a valuable part of the overall offering.

The BIC, an ISO standard assigned by Swift, is a code that identifies a financial institution, or an entity within a financial institution and is used in automated processing. The BEI identifies non-financial organizations, facilitating the processing of telecommunication messages.