Financial messaging platform SWIFT has announced the addition of peer assessment to its Sanctions Testing service.

Sanctions Testing aims to help financial institutions improve the performance of their transaction and customer screening systems by analysing whether their systems are operating correctly and are able to detect illicit transactions or sanctioned customers.

Financial crime compliance
The peer assessment service has been developed together with Sanctions Testing customers as part of SWIFT’s 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.

Evolving service
The 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.

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.

For more information about SWIFT’s Sanctions Testing, visit www.swift.com/sanctionstesting.