SWIFT has launched an enhanced Case Management service to standardise and automate investigations into delayed cross-border payments, aiming to reduce resolution times and the operational burden on financial institutions. The cooperative estimates the industry spends more than USD 1.6 billion a year on labour-intensive investigations, with some large global banks incurring more than USD 20 million annually in fees and penalties. According to new research cited by SWIFT, the network-agnostic capability could cut operational and liquidity costs by more than USD 600 million per year and reduce the time to resolve a case by up to 80%. The service leverages ISO 20022 data and the unique end-to-end transaction reference (UETR) to track a payment’s status and location, capturing information centrally and reducing manual interactions between sending and receiving institutions, with potential applicability beyond the SWIFT network for payments that use a UETR. More than 30 global financial institutions have trialled the enhanced product and it is now available to the global SWIFT community.