This API is designed to support banks to prepare their cross-border payment requests and check if the payment information is valid and in good standing with the country-specific requirements at the destination.

Pre-validation services are available to validate individual payment information, multiple payment information aggregated together, right through to validating entire payment requests.

Best customer experience

• Validate and improve critical payment elements
• Increased confidence that the payment will be processed STP
• Provide more fine-grained feedback to customers

Compliance

• With international and domestic requirements
• Increase certainty before reaching out to the beneficiary bank

Reduced operational cost

• Automated detection of payment errors
• Fewer payment exceptions and investigations

All banks can pre-validate their cross-border payment information with Swift, against Swift reference data, country-specific requirements, or historical pseudonymised account statistics, or with other institutions that subscribed to the service as Payment Pre-validation data providers (for example, beneficiary banks).

Payment Pre-validation User will:

• Implement an API client and issue API requests towards Swift to validate cross-border payment information

Swift will:

• Perform pre-validation services centrally, using Swift reference data and country-specific requirements

• Facilitate the validation of cross-border payment information with other institutions (e.g. beneficiary banks)

Currently, below validation services are available:

• Verify Beneficiary Account:

  • BAV - Can you, the creditor agent, check if this account is able to receive funds?

  • CBAV - Can you, Swift, check if this account is able to receive funds?

• Validate Payment Purpose Code: Is the payment purpose code present? If it is, does the code match one of the expected values? If it is not present, then it returns a list of valid codes.

• Validate Payment Purpose: Is the payment purpose code present? If it is, does the code match one of the expected values and the description the expected format? If it is not present, then it returns a list of valid codes.

• Validate Amount: Is the amount inline with currency number of decimals and inline with the payment Market Infrastructure (MI) specific amount limits?

• Validate Account Format: Does the account format (from IBAN to domestic, bank-specific format) match the expected formatting?

• Validate Category Purpose: Is the payment category purpose required, and if it is, does the purpose match one of the expected values?

• Validate Financial Institution Identity: Is the institution (BIC or Clearing System Member ID) registered in SwiftRef as a financial institution?

• Validate SwiftGo Eligibility: Does the payment satisfy the SwiftGo Rulebook eligibility requirements? If it does, then it returns payment predictability information.

• Validate Payment Instruction or Contextual Payment Validation (New - under development): Do the presented payment instruction data elements pass the multiple validations in the context of the currency corridor / country requirements? How is the data quality of the payment instruction?

For further details, please refer to the Functional Specifications for Consumers.

The Payment Pre-validation Data Provider API details how to respond to beneficiary account validation requests.

Network Options

There are two network options available to Payment Pre-validation users to support different operating models. Depending on their individual needs, users can choose to pre-validate their payments over the public internet and/or over Swift’s highly secure network (MV-SIPN).

Using the API over the Swift network, for example, enables you to integrate pre-validation services in your back-end systems. On the other hand, using the API over the public internet could be used to integrate pre-validation services into your front-end, online channels. For more information on each network option, refer to Additional Material.