Swift, the global financial messaging network, is launching a new AI-powered service to help banks fight financial crime.
The service, which will be available in January 2025, uses artificial intelligence to analyse pseudonymised data from billions of transactions and flag suspicious activity in real time.
This new capability builds on Swift‘s existing Payment Controls Service and was developed in collaboration with banks around the world.
It is part of Swift’s broader collaboration with its global community of more than 11,500 banks and financial institutions.
It was successfully piloted earlier this year with institutions in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East.
Swift aims to address the growing sophistication of financial criminals and the rising cost of fraud, estimated at US$485 billion globally in 2023.
The initiative is part of Swift’s broader efforts to use AI to improve the security of cross-border payments.
Swift is also testing fraud detection use cases in a sandbox environment.
Additionally, Swift is exploring the use of federated learning, a privacy-preserving AI technique, to allow banks to share information securely and improve fraud detection models collaboratively.
Jerome Piens, Chief Product Officer at Swift, said,
“Bad actors are using increasingly sophisticated tactics to commit financial crime, and the global financial industry needs to raise its defences higher to ensure their customers can continue to transact globally with confidence.
Swift has a long track record of supporting our community by staying one step ahead to maintain the security and resilience that our network is known for – and now we’re doing so again by harnessing the latest technology.”
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik