Swift has added ultimate ownership data to entities in its Entity Plus directory and is planning to add more hierarchy data to the entity data in line with the requirements of its user community.

Entity Plus was made available late last year to support financial institutions’ entity data management processes and compliance with regulations that require entity data such as Legal Entity Identifiers and include European Market Infrastructure Regulation, Dodd-Frank, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II. The addition of ultimate ownership data, which is published on a daily and monthly basis, supports compliance while extending institutions’ risk management capabilities and providing a better understanding of risk exposure.

Entity Plus is a data directory within the SwiftRef reference data utility, which was also augmented late last year with Reach Plus. The Reach Plus directory supports payments data and provides options for reaching and routing payments to beneficiary banks. This allows users to decide how best to process and route payments efficiently and cost effectively.

Along with additions to SwiftRef, Swift has issued its 2016 standards release, which includes changes to Swift messages used in the securities market. The go live date for the standards is November 20th, 2016.

While some financial institutions will work in-house to accommodate the changes, Volante Technologies, a provider of software for the integration and processing of financial messages, says increasing numbers of organisations are looking to third parties to support industry standards and updates.

Volante was quick to respond to the Swift standards release and has developed an update to its Swift plug-in that can handle both the messaging changes and SwiftRef additions. Venkat Malla, vice president of product management at Volante, says: “Volante is recognised as one of the go-to companies for access to Swift messaging and our research and development team works constantly to ensure our clients have the latest financial message integration capabilities. We add a layer of software on top of the standards that isolates clients from data such as the detail of how Swift messages must be formatted. This reduces the cost and burden of migrating to new standards and allows clients to focus on core business, rather than worry about standards compliance.”