UAE Banks Federation & SWIFT Ensure Secure Banking Operations

3 June 2015: The UAE Banks Federation, a professional body representing 50 member banks operating in the UAE, has over the past month held a number of seminars with SWIFT, the global provider of secure financial messaging and other services, to provide member banks with hands-on expertise in a range of SWIFT platforms.  

The workshops addressed support and business continuity strategies to help UAE banks and financial institutions ensure the safety and security of their operations, as well as to optimise their integration with SWIFT services. Initial workshops focused on business continuity and data recovery, as well as using different messaging formats.  In later sessions banks were advised about the latest technology offered by SWIFT to support sanctions compliance and the “Know Your Customer” (KYC) principle, which ensures that all transactions handled by banks are legitimate and to enable banks to actively prevent financial crime.

The last workshop in the series discussed global compliance trends and the impact on the local/regional players in the Middle East, as well as challenges in the payments business. It reviewed the evolution of regulatory challenges (FATF, OECD, G20), financial crime (Anti-Money Laundering AML, Counter Terrorist Financing-CTF), transparency, identification and information sharing (Tax, FATCA) and capital and liquidity (BCBS / Basel III). 

In particular, the last session focused on how technology can play a key role in managing multiple and ever-changing requirements from global and local regulatory bodies to ensure that banks and financial institutions are managing their risk profiles effectively. In this context, SWIFT’s compliance portfolio, includingthe KYC Registry and Sanctions Screening, was discussed. 

More than 100 senior representatives of member banks and financial institutions attended these sessions, which were held at the UAE Banks Federation building in Abu Dhabi.

The Director General of the UAE Banks Federation, Mr. Nassir Sarris, said “IT managers in banks are facing a rapidly changing world, and there is an increasing need for more systems for banks to communicate together and with SWIFT, driven by business growth and with changes in the structure of their businesses. Our partnership with SWIFT is to ensure that UAE banks are both up to date and compliant with all of the essential tools to support their business efficiency and their compliance with rules to help beat financial crime”

Mr. Sarris praised the continuous cooperation between SWIFT and UBF indicating the pioneering role UBF played to introduce SWIFT to the banking and financial sector in UAE in the late eighties.

Mr. Sido Bestani, Head of MENA & Turkey for SWIFT, added “As SWIFT users, financial institutions understand how important the connection to SWIFT is to their operations. But emergencies can disrupt access to the SWIFT network, and the need for immediate recovery is essential. Also, the banking and financial community in the UAE and the region want to be kept abreast of the ever-changing global regulations. Our workshops aim to do just that, by creating an open platform to discuss regulatory and operational challenges that banks face in their daily activities and introducing them to the latest solutions available to them. As a banking cooperative, SWIFT listens to these challenges and helps develop solutions and tools that address the banks’ more intricate business and operational requirements and reduce their costs and risks.”

It is worth noting that the United Arab Emirates ranks first regionally for incoming and outgoing messages through SWIFT, and has ranked nineteenth worldwide in terms of the number of incoming messages, and the twentieth in terms of outgoing messages.