As a corporate dealing with multiple financial institutions, Emirates Airlines needed to first understand the Message Implementation Guidelines (MIGs) of all the banks they wanted to work with. They turned to Citi and have worked with SWIFT MyStandards to provide the solution.

SWIFT MyStandards is a key part of the solution for Emirates Airlines

The challenge

As a multinational corporate dealing with multiple financial institutions, Emirates needed to first understand the Message Implementation Guidelines (MIGs) of all the banks they wanted to work with. The guidelines are typically documented in different ways across a variety of incompatible documentation formats. It is often difficult to clarify the needs and understand what you have to update if you want to start working with an additional bank. On-boarding a new destination required a lot of time to integrate payment systems with the respective banks. Emirate’s application development team were required to be dependent on banks during file format testing and it took a lot of time to get clarity on any new regulatory changes which needed to be complied with.

Umar Pirzada, Manager Treasury – Banking, Systems & Procedures PMO – Corporate Treasury explains, “Our objective was to have a self-service platform where the IT team managing the XML file formats is not dependent on banks to test the file format and to reduce the turnaround time in enabling efficient banking operations for new destinations.”

The solution

Emirates turned to Citi, who has provided them with digital access to cutting-edge technology that addresses speed to market. Citi has embraced the use of a digital enabler through a partnership and collaboration with SWIFT and together they have developed a new tool called SWIFT MyStandards, which simplifies on-boarding and the testing process for payment files, providing access to Emirates to drive and speed up the development of ISO 20022.

The SWIFT MyStandards Readiness Portal is a cloud-based on-boarding and testing tool, so that it could share Citi formatting guidelines in an easy-to-use interactive environment and start file structure and content validation testing in parallel with its planned account-opening process.

Best practice and innovation

Centralising, implementing and using standards-related information, which often involves a lot of time and resources across different departments can be a large undertaking for any organisation. MyStandards is an industry initiative, gathering message specifications from major banks and market practice groups in a central, user-friendly and up-to-date web platform. It simplifies the communication, implementation and maintenance of all standards-related information between Emirates Airlines and its banks.

Pirzada comments, “MyStandards is the platform where documentation about the MT and ISO 20022 standards is published. It eases your analysis and understanding of the message formats.”

Pirzada concludes, “The SWIFT MyStandards tool introduced to us by Citi has helped us independently test XML format changes in different regions globally before even sending the files across for testing to the bank. This has saved us implementation time and effort by avoiding the to and fro communication. The confidence level before UAT is much higher and the number of rounds of testing required with the bank have reduced leading to saving on both sides. This is a highly recommended tool for corporates who manage XML development on their side.”