Despite the tremendous push towards fully automating trade confirmations between banks and corporates in recent years, many transactions are still confirmed manually. Manual confirmations are slow and error-prone, putting both sides of the trade at risk. In addition, many international regulations such as EMIR and Dodd-Frank have demanded an increase in automation.
Corporate treasurers often use SWIFT to standardize their confirmation messages. SWIFT is a cooperative that connects the financial community by providing highly secure financial messaging services that eliminate manual processing and makes inefficient paper confirmations redundant. More than 11,000 financial institutions, corporations, and other financial entities use SWIFT to exchange confirmations (SWIFT, 2019).
This article will explore several ways to confirm foreign exchange, money market, and currency option settlements through different solutions connected to SAP.
Over the last several years, the SWIFT Network has experienced growing popularity with corporates of all sizes, stretching from large corporates with a high volume of transactions to small-to-medium corporates with a lower volume of transactions. As a result, corporates have several options when deciding on a connectivity solution:
Figure 1: Direct Connectivity (SWIFT, 2019)
Figure 2: Alliance Lite 2 (SWIFT, 2019)
Figure 3: Swift Service Bureau (SWIFT, 2019)
Trading platforms such as 360T, Bloomberg and FXall offer automated back-office trade processing with SWIFT confirmation messages and trade matching.
The service allows corporate treasurers and banks to exchange deal confirmations directly on the trading platform. Messages are sent via the SWIFT networks directly to and from the banks, with the outgoing (incoming confirmation) and incoming messages (bankside confirmation) being automatically processed on the platform.
SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity (MBC) is SAP’s offering of a SWIFT connection embedded within Business Applications. This cloud-based solution offers a multi-bank digital channel between SAP and partner banks. In addition, SAP MBC is being provided as a SaaS solution by SAP.
A SWIFT Service provider is not needed for SAP customers to send confirmations messages through the SWIFT network, as SWIFT services are given by SAP through an embedded version of Alliance Lite 2. This streamlines trade confirmations for the TRM module, as message statuses are automatically updated directly in SAP. Moreover, the integration platform offers connectivity to partner banks through EBICS and Host-to-Host connection.
Figure 4: SAP MBC (SAP SE, 2018)
This framework in SAP is an excellent tool to manage all correspondence objects. For example, back-office users can view incoming and outgoing messages and resend those messages previously failed to send. In addition, the monitor provides a historical overview of all the deals that have previously been confirmed.
Furthermore, it also allows you to view PDF messages that have been sent out, for example, to your internal counterparties.
Through the t-code, technical users can customize messages when their requirements are not covered by standard functionality. For example, previously, SAP TRM did not offer MT305s as a standard message format. The user could then reconfigure standard functionality to fit different message types not provided in the standard TRM Module.
Below is an example of a corporates SAP TMS connected to the SWIFT network through a SWIFT Service Bureau.
Figure 5: SAP Confirmation Connectivity
SWIFT Service Bureaus and Alliance Lite2 have been the most popular choice in sending out confirmations to and from the bank, with over 50% of all corporates accessing SWIFT through either connection. However, the offering of SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity is especially attractive to those corporates with a technology roadmap leading towards SAP as a key ERP provider. Nowadays, many corporates are transitioning towards their S/4 HANA transformations journey and are looking at their SWIFT connectivity options. Therefore, SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity is likely to compare favorably to SWIFT Service Bureaus in the coming years.
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