Being tested in the pilot mode, the trade financing validation technology is now available to banks across the Swift network through its API channel
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Swift has teamed up with fintech vendor MonetaGo to tackle trade finance fraud. The messaging network’s 11,000+ members can now avoid duplicate financing threats in near real-time.
The solution allows financial institutions to check for duplicates of various documents, e.g. invoices, bills of lading, warehouse receipts or purchase orders, before financing them. The MonetaGo system creates digital fingerprints of the documents with a hashing algorithm. Then fingerprints are registered in a global unified hash repository.
In case the same document is registered multiple times by more than one lender, the system will flag all new entries except for the first unique instance as duplicates.
The testing phase lasted for about a year, with 20 institutions from four different continents involved. The participants added data to the Secure Financing platform, observing the results of the duplicate financing checks arriving almost instantaneously.
The universal, standardised solution offered by Swift and MonetaGo will save lenders billions of dollars in losses. In the absence of a single repository and data sharing, each individual lender is limited to the data available to them.
Thus, when seemingly legitimate businesses present the same invoice to multiple lenders, money often arrives at the hands of bad actors.
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