As the leader in global interbank telecommunications, and in an effort to standardize international cover payment messaging practices in cross-border wire transfers, SWIFT developed new standards for all cover payments. These standards became effective in November 2009. The new MT 202 COV, which is simply a variant of the MT 202, is aimed at providing greater transparency by making all payment information available to the originating institution also available to other institutions in the payment process. The MT 202 COV, which must now be used for all cover payments, replicates certain information fields from the MT 103 (namely, the originator and beneficiary information fields). The MT 202 may still be used for interbank settlement payments, but not for cover payments. The creation of this new standard now requires financial institutions, and specifically correspondent banks, to apply risk-based monitoring practices to customer and payment information to which they were not previously privy. Although the MT 202 COV mandates the inclusion of all customer and financial institution identifying information, it is important to note that SWIFT does not play a role in validating or policing the standard. This responsibility falls to member institutions themselves. The SWIFT system will reject a transfer where the originator and beneficiary fields are blank; however, it is unable to determine if information entered in those fields contains false or incomplete data. Box F.2 describes two ways that financial institutions attempt to wire transfer information.
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Asset Recovery Handbook