About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

HSBC Selects Petra Financial for Payments Reference Data

Subscribe to our newsletter

HSBC has selected Petra Financial as a partner to provide a new tool that will allow the bank’s clients to validate BIC and IBAN details before the submission of a payment or, if required, to derive these details from a bank name, address and Basic Bank Account Number (BBAN), subject to counterparty verification. The tool, which is available to corporate clients either on a CD or online, has been dubbed Global Payments Directory BIC and IBAN.

The bank hopes that the tool will help its clients simplify cross border euro denominated payments and reduce repair fees, thus meeting the requirements of SEPA. It also claims that the solution will minimise the risk of payment delays or rejections.

Paul Nixon, senior product manager, financial institutions, global payments and cash management, Europe, HSBC Bank, explains: “The introduction of new standards in Europe has had an impact on many of our clients worldwide. For a variety of reasons, it has proved difficult for many of our financial institution and corporate clients to get hold of the information needed to complete a payment in accordance with the new standards. By teaming up with Petra Financial, we have been able to come up with a way of making it easier for our clients to achieve significantly higher STP levels.”

John Burton, marketing director for Petra Financial, says that the vendor and the bank have been discussing the project for four months. The vendor, which launched at last year’s Sibos, has been offering the tool online and it is the first time that it has been available on CD.

“We have signed nine clients to the Vortex service over the last year,” says Burton. “It is available in an online format or we can run it via a software as a service model.”
Europe is the focus of the vendor’s efforts in this space at the moment, he explains, as SEPA is driving banks to invest in the entity data space for payments validations. Petra Financial is also pushing its services in Asia, South Africa and the Middle East, but these markets require a different approach, according to Burton. “Europe tends to look at investments in this space as a method of reducing costs but Asia in particular looks at it as a method of improving customer service,” he says.

The vendor does have plans to expand into the US in the long term but this will not be in the near future, Burton concludes.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Optimising outsourced infrastructure for trading in fast markets

In fast markets, you must move quickly to identify and fix any problems with latency, systems and algo performance, but what you cannot see you cannot fix. This begs the question of how trading organisations can see, understand and optimise their infrastructure as it interacts with fast markets to ensure optimal trading connectivity. The answer...

BLOG

From Batch to Real-Time: LSEG Reinvents AML Screening with World-Check On Demand

As financial institutions accelerate toward real-time payments and digital onboarding, compliance teams face mounting pressure to keep customer screening instant, accurate and demonstrable. In response, the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has introduced World-Check On Demand – a new cloud-based service designed to deliver “real-time risk intelligence” through API integration, allowing institutions to embed sanctions...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

Pricing and Valuations

This special report accompanies a webinar we held a webinar on the popular topic of Pricing and Valuations, discussing issues such as transparency of pricing and how to ensure data quality. You can register here to get immediate access to the Special Report.