UBF and Swift Host Virtual Meeting With UAE Swift User's Group on Messaging Standards and Future Developments

The UAE Banks Federation (UBF) in partnership with SWIFT, the leading provider of secure financial messaging services, today held a virtual meeting with UAE SWIFT user’s group, to discuss the importance of adopting new messaging standards to further promote a secure and robust banking ecosystem.

SWIFT’s objective is to support the evolving payments and securities business of financial institutions. Over the next two years and beyond, it will fundamentally transform what it does — innovating to facilitate instant and frictionless payments from account-to-account anywhere in the world, with an end-to-end solution that combines international and domestic capabilities.

H.E. AbdulAziz AlGhurair, Chairman of the UBF, said: “Today’s meeting comes at a critical time, as it has never been more important for the networks across the financial ecosystem to be reliable, safe and secure, and for our member banks to be up to date with the latest developments. The UBF’s close collaboration with SWIFT ensures the ever-changing financial community in the UAE is aligned with the highest international standards, and is equipped with the latest solutions available. This will be particularly important over the coming months, as we continue to extend our support to banks and the wider community with their financial requirements.”

Onur Ozan, Head of Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, SWIFT, said: “We value the close collaboration with UBF and look forward to working with the UAE financial community on the adoption of ISO 20022. Rich data lies at the heart of our vision for the future. It will provide the foundations for financial institutions to innovate and deliver better payments and digital experiences to end customers.”

UBF and SWIFT are driving the adoption of ISO 20022 across the UAE banking sector. The new messaging standards are an emerging global and open standard for payments messaging, creating a common language and model for payments data across the globe. They provide higher quality data than other standards, which means higher quality payments for all.