SWIFT has announced the addition of Peer Assessment to its Sanctions Testing service. SWIFT’s Sanctions Testing helps financial institutions optimize the performance of their transaction and customer screening systems by analyzing whether their systems are operating correctly and are able to detect illicit transactions or sanctioned customers.

SWIFT’s Peer Assessment service has been developed together with Sanctions Testing customers as part of SWIFT’s community-driven approach to providing financial crime compliance services. This optional service enhances SWIFT’s Sanctions Testing offering by enabling financial institutions to compare the performance of their sanctions filters against those of other participating institutions.

SWIFT’s Peer Assessment service uses a performance baseline of aggregated data from other Sanctions Testing users with similar business characteristics. The baseline will be extended and evolve over time as banks join the service, and the community-driven initiative broadens the scope of performance assessment and operational practices.

Launched in 2012, SWIFT’s Sanctions Testing checks transaction and client filter effectiveness for exact “hits” as well as “fuzzy” matches (names that are similar to, but not exactly the same as those on sanctions lists). It enables users to integrate regular testing and tuning into their sanctions compliance processes and allows them to create a strategy for enhanced efficiency and performance. SWIFT provides group and regional license options, along with assessment and consultancy services.

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