SWIFTPay Payment Solution

The following are the requirements and features of the SWIFT FIN service option for payments:

1. Corporate customer is expected to be registered on SWIFT with a unique SWIFT ID as well as be a member of SCORE (Standardized Corporate Environment). Alternatively, a corporate that is not registered on SCORE may choose to ride on the SWIFT BIC of a financial institution which the corporate would have nominated to act as forwarding party for its payment instructions.

BIC stands for Bank Identifier Code. A BIC is sometimes called a SWIFT code, SWIFT BIC or SWIFT ID (all of these mean the same thing). A SWIFT BIC consists of 8-11 characters used to identify a specific bank in an international transaction, to ensure the money is going to the right place.

2. The Corporate customer and Zenith bank will sign a SWIFT MT101 BILATERAL AGREEMENT which is a physical document. SWIFT has registered and published the accession of Signatories to the Service Level Master Agreement (“SLMA”) for any two parties who are at the verge of using this service.
3. The Corporate customer and Zenith bank will execute an RMA key exchange. SWIFT's RMA plays an important part in supporting communication between different financial institutions or parties. The RMA is a SWIFT-mandated filter that enables financial institutions to define which counterparties can send them FIN messages such as MT101 messages.
4. Having met the pre-requisites above, the corporate customer can generate MT101 messages from its ERP and transmit same to Zenith bank via the SWIFT network. The MT101 messages are validated by SWIFT before it is delivered to Zenith bank, and payments are then made to the beneficiaries.
5. Having executed the payment instructions received, Zenith bank will deliver the customer’s statement of account(s) to the corporate customer’s ERP via the SWIFT FIN service in SWIFT MT940 statement format. Most ERP’s will use this MT940 to achieve auto-reconciliation of all payments made on this platform.