MUSCAT: Bank Muscat, the flagship financial services provider in the Sultanate, has won a prestigious award from JP Morgan Bank in recognition of its operational excellence in the field of dollar payments processing. Bank Muscat won the top honour, JP Morgan Elite quality recognition award, with an outstanding performance of 99.79 per cent straight-through-processing (STP) in dollar-denominated fund transfer and commercial payments.
Bank Muscat exceeded the stringent STP performance standards and qualified for the award which recognised its exceptional quality of SWIFT messages on dollar payment, maintaining an outstanding error-free rate for remittances. The award was based on evaluation of the quality and accuracy of SWIFT payment messages routed through the JP Morgan Bank. The award highlighted the bank’s commitment to maintaining high quality standards in meeting the stringent criteria for fund transfer. The bank’s ability to offer 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 bank’s Central Operations electronic payments department, treasury back office and Global Trade Services department handle the fund transfer operations while the technical and security issues are handled by the Systems & Procedures department. 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.
JP Morgan Bank is among Bank Muscat’s prominent correspondent banks for dollar payments. Representatives of JP Morgan Bank commended the operational teams involved in processing dollar payments at Bank Muscat for the error-free rate maintained consistently throughout the high volume of remittances processed during 2016. A multi-award winning organisation, Bank Muscat’s STP performance has been consistently lauded by the international financial and banking community for several years. In recognition of outstanding contributions to the banking sector in Oman, Bank Muscat continued to win all prestigious global awards in 2016 by Euromoney, Global Finance, Emea finance, the Banker Middle East and the World Union of Arab Bankers (WUAB). The bank also won the Best Brand and Oman’s Most Trusted Brand awards by Business Today and Muscat Daily.
