Mubasher: SWIFT, the world’s leading secure financial messaging services provider, announced that its corporate treasury user community in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region increased by above 30% in 2018, according to a statement on Monday.
The Belgium-based global financial services firm plans to double the number of corporations using SWIFT for treasury operations between 2018 and 2021.
“More than 2,000 corporate groups are using SWIFT. Corporates are also embracing SWIFT global payment innovation (gpi) – the new standard in global payments – for their transactions, and taking advantage of additional value-added services such as KYC for Corporates, which allows corporates to upload, maintain, and share their KYC information with their banks,” the statement added.
In cooperation with Emirates NBD, Kyriba, Saudi British Bank (SABB), and National Commercial Bank (NCB), SWIFT held several corporate forums on digitalisation in treasury and the future of cross-border payments in Dubai and Riyadh.
OLA Energy is one of the corporations that used “SWIFT for Corporates” in their highly complex treasury operations.
Using SWIFT, OLA Energy managed to “transform and fully automate the payment process and cash positioning,” group treasurer at OLA Energy, Abdessalem Lassoued, said.
“Tracking payments through SWIFT saves [the company] a lot of time and adds tangible business benefits, especially when it comes to full visibility of real-time, group-wide cash positions, and FX exposure. This implementation is expected to optimise [its] operational efficiency by 80% and reduce [its] costs by 20%,” Lassoued added.
With SWIFT, “corporates benefit from a single, highly secure window to communicate with all their banking partners using global standardised financial messages. The result is a decrease in operational risk and costs as well as improved cash visibility,” head of corporate business at SWIFT, Mickael Thomas, noted.
