SWIFT mines its vast data flows to detect and flag the most common cause of cross-border payment delays: Errors in payee information. This capability is made possible thanks to SWIFT’s near-ubiquity as a bank-to-bank messaging platform, underscoring the benefits of analyzing massive datasets.

In its quest to enable real-time international payments, SWIFT has launched a new predictive data intelligence tool that checks impending payments against historical records and prompts customers to fix potential errors or typos before processing begins. The centralized verification system will draw on aggregated and anonymized data from the 9 billion transaction messages between 4 billion accounts that it processes each year.

“Friction in the payments system costs the industry more than $2 billion every year, affecting over 700 million transactions,” a SWIFT spokesperson told Insights Distilled, blaming the kind of typos and formatting errors that would now be flagged.

Representatives from HSBC, Standard Chartered, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Mexico’s Banca Mifel, and Turkey’s Yapi Kredi Bank have already praised the new capability: It will bring “real cost-savings and efficiency gains,” according to Banca Mifel’s Arturo Rivera Fermoso, while HSBC’s Vijay Lulla said it was “an important step in removing friction from cross-border payments.”