Swift Develops API to Automate KYC Registry Data Consumption

Swift has developed an API to automate its KYC Registry, with the aim of creating time efficiencies, particularly for large institutions.

Marie-Charlotte Henseval, head of KYC compliance services at Swift, says the API enables banks that consume information from the platform to automate and integrate that data directly into their back-office systems.  

“Customers can use the API to automatically schedule the download of a correspondent bank’s KYC profile. The data can then be stored directly into the customer’s database and used to populate any data fields in the customer’s client management applications,” Henseval says. “The API eliminates the manual effort of logging into the KYC Registry, searching for a correspondent’s KYC profile, opening it, downloading it and then storing it in a central place for further processing.” 

She says all the customer has to do is instruct its API to download a certain dataset and store it in a pre-selected place. “The time savings, particularly for large institutions, are significant,” she says.

The API offered by the KYC Registry is, at the moment, reactive. In 2020, we intend to offer a proactive API, which will proactively push new or updated KYC data to its customers.  

Marie-Charlotte Henseval, Swift

According to Henseval, the development of the API was completed in March 2019. From March to May, Swift tested and fine-tuned the interface, along with representative banks from its user group. In June, the API was made available to all KYC Registry customers. 

The registry, launched in December 2014 and hosted on Swift’s server in Belgium, is a central repository where institutions upload and manage their due diligence information in a standardized way. 

The idea is to be the one-stop shop where financial institutions can manage their due diligence and KYC information, says Henseval, and then to share with their correspondent banks to reduce the bilateral exchanges taking place in the KYC space. Today, the Swift Registry has more than 5,500 banks registered and using the service.

Henseval says the standard it has today meets up to 90% of bank requirements, almost eliminating fully bilateral exchanges. Before, registry banks had to exchange questionnaires on a bilateral basis. She gives the example of a bank with 100 relationships, which would traditionally have had to exchange the same type of information100 times with all its different partners.

Looking Ahead

In the fourth quarter of this year, Swift plans to extend its KYC Registry to Swift-connected corporations, enabling them to upload and maintain their information to the registry, and to share it with banks who will be able to use it for their corporate KYC activities.

Next year, Swift plans to introduce what it calls a “proactive API”. “The API offered by the KYC Registry is, at the moment, ‘reactive,’” says Henseval. “This means that the customer has to initiate the call and request data via API. In 2020, we intend to offer a proactive API, which will proactively push new or updated KYC data to customers. This will ensure our customers always use the latest KYC profile that has been made available by their correspondents, without the need to manually check if new data is available.”