Correspondent Banking

With the Correspondent Banking solution you can send and receive cross-border payments using Banking Circle while quoting your BIC and any account number issued by you. This enables you to stay in control of your customer relationship, and it contributes to transparency in the payment chain.

1. You will instruct outbound payments, quoting your own BIC and account numbers issued by you
2. Banking Circle will send the payment out through the most effective payment rail available
3. The receiver will see your customer as the 'Ordering Customer' and your BIC as the 'Ordering Institution'
4. For incoming payments, the flow is reversed, and we will send a notification to you, when we receive a payment sent to you

We currently manage payments in 24 currencies. We process each currency at different cut-off times - go to the full overview here.

How to use the solution

The Correspondent Banking solution has two integration channels - via SWIFT or via API.

• If you have already been using SWIFT and have an active interface in place with the network, you can keep using it and initiate payments towards Banking Circle. We will receive your instructions and manage clearing and settlement of your payments.
• If you choose to integrate directly with us, you can benefit from real time processing and monitoring your payment flows. Our API offers payment initiation as well as notifications and reporting.

Payment initiation

With the Correspondent Banking solution, you will instruct and receive either a customer transfer or a bank transfer.

But how do you initiate these payments? That depends on the integration method you choose.

We will then manage your payment instruction and send it through the most effective rail available for your client profile. In most cases, we will send and receive MT103 and MT202 messages via SWIFT or the RTGS systems.

• Single Customer Credit Transfer - MT103 is a customer credit transfer message for a single payment which consists of a transfer between two parties, the ordering customer and the beneficiary customer.
• General Financial Institution Transfer - MT202 is a bank transfer message for a single payment used to instruct a fund transfer between financial institutions, the ordering institution and the beneficiary institution.

We support both cover and serial methods. If you wish to use the cover method, your MT103 will require to be paired with a MT202 COV message.

Sending Payments with FX

Correspondent Banking solution allows you to send and receive payments in up to 24 currencies with a single currency nostro account of your choice.

Instruct outbound payments with a live rate or using a quote obtained via our Request for Quote (RFQ) solution.

Banking Circle’s Correspondent Banking with FX solution for payments combines our Correspondent Banking and FX capabilities in one of the two following ways:

A. Embedded currency conversion for instruction via API by populating currencyOfTransfer, once a different currency is specified here than in amount, the system knows an embedded FX transaction will be triggered. Via Swift, FX embeded payments can be instructed via population fields 32, 33 and 36.

B. Obtain the quote prior to payment initiation via RFQ, which locks the rate for 30 seconds. Include the QuoteID obtained in your payment instruction in fxQuoteID.

Notifications and reports

Depending on the integration method you choose, there will be notifications and reports to facilitate operations and reconciliation on your side.

Notifications allow you to monitor your payment flows dynamically. You can receive and process SWIFT messages or integrate Webhooks for a seamless experience.

**MT900/MT910 show your transaction reference for reconciliation purpose.

Reports are useful reconciliation tools. We offer a wide range of reports that cover standard formats such as MT9xx messages and proprietary formats for detailed reporting, available via API and via the Client Portal.

Report types supported via SWIFT: MT940, MT942 and MT950.