Swift Payment Controls Service

Payment Controls Service (PCS) is Swift’s in-network fraud detection and payment screening service, run by the Belgium-based member cooperative that operates the global financial messaging network. It is aimed primarily at small and medium-sized financial institutions that lack a large in-house fraud stack.

Banks configure rules over payment parameters — counterparties, corridors, currencies, amounts, timing — and PCS alerts on and blocks outgoing FIN and ISO 20022 payments, covering MT 103, MT 202, MT 202COV and pacs.004, pacs.008 and pacs.009. A reporting component provides daily views of both sent and received traffic drawn from Swift’s independent network records. From January 2025 Swift added an AI layer trained on pseudonymised data from billions of transactions across the network, enabling account-level anomaly detection in real time.

1. Rule-based alerting and blocking on outgoing FIN and ISO 20022 payments (MT 103, MT 202, MT 202COV, pacs.004/008/009).

2. AI-powered fraud detection added from January 2025, trained on pseudonymised data from billions of transactions on the Swift network.

3. Detects account-level anomalies using network-wide patterns no single institution can see alone.

4. Daily Payment Controls Reporting on both sent and received payments, based on Swift's independent network reports.

5. In-network delivery designed for small and medium-sized institutions, with no local fraud infrastructure to build.

6. Swift federated-learning experiments with 13 institutions produced a model twice as effective at identifying known fraud as single-institution training.