Bank Muscat, the flagship financial services provider in the Sultanate, has won a prestigious straight through processing (STP) award from Barclays Bank in recognition of operational excellence in the field of British Pound (GBP) payments processing.
The award recognised the bank’s exceptional quality of SWIFT messages on GBP payment, maintaining an outstanding error-free rate for remittances of over 96%. The award was based on evaluation of the quality and accuracy of SWIFT payment messages routed through Barclays Bank. The bank’s Central Operations electronic payments department, Treasury back office and Global Trade Services department are handling fund transfer operations while the technical and security issues are handled by the Systems & Procedures department.
The ‘Recognition Award for Outstanding Payment Systems in GBP’ highlighted the bank’s commitment to high standards of quality in meeting the stringent criteria for fund transfer. The bank’s exceptional quality in the delivery of commercial payments and transfers, facilitated by a state-of-the-art in-house payment architecture, which helps to consistently maintain high SWIFT standards for automated processing throughout the payment chain resulting in extremely high STP rates, was also acknowledged.
The Financial Institutions Group, reckoned as one of the leading FI teams in the region, has established more than 500 correspondent banking relationships across the world.
Barclays Bank is among Bank Muscat’s prominent correspondent bank for British Pound payments. Representatives of Barclays Bank commended the operational teams involved in processing GBP payments at Bank Muscat for the error-free rate maintained consistently throughout the high volume of remittances processed during 2014.
A multi-award winning organisation, Bank Muscat’s STP performance has been consistently lauded by the international financial and banking community for several years.