Workers’ Remittances

Workers’ remittances are generally defined as “cross-border, person-to-person payments of relatively low-value.” According to SWIFT's reports, it is estimated that over 200 million migrants initiate 1 to 1.5 billion cross-border payments per year. Industry revenue exceeds USD 15 billion per year.

The SWIFT Workers' Remittances service is designed to support banks' needs for bilateral clearing and settlement of person-to-person payments.

The following components of Workers’ Remittances provide an efficient platform for exchanging person-to-person payments.

• Market practice rulebook: outlines the common business and operational rules for processing these payments. The purpose is to ensure that banks can offer consistent levels of customer service across all their bilateral routes. 
• Messaging standards: subsets of the ISO 20022 XML payments clearing and settlement messages have been tailored for the key flows:
  — Payment instruction;
  — Return;
  — Reject/Status.
• Reference data: a common way to exchange interbank routing and point of service location data in order to enhance straight-through processing.

Benefits:

• To helps banks to deliver a robust value proposition to their customers in terms of time/ cost transparency and ease of use.
• To bring efficiency and scalability in bilateral bank services.
• To supports any type of retails payment instrument.
• The service remains commercially and brand neutral.

Click here to find out Synergy’s case histories for Workers’ Remittances Service.