On December 11, 2014, SWIFT announced the launch of its Know Your Customer Registry (KYC Registry), which allows correspondent banks (banks that offer banking services to other financial entities) to exchange information using a centralized registry in place of the current bilateral document exchange. The KYC Registry aims to facilitate compliance with know-your-customer rules issued by major financial regulators globally for SWIFT's 7000 correspondent banks that maintain roughly 1.3 million bilateral relationships.

The KYC Registry will allow banks to upload and make available on an individual basis to other correspondent banks documentation covering:

Examples of the types of documents that can be uploaded to the KYC Registry include:

The correspondent banking industry and SWIFT have defined the full list of relevant documentation to address differing global regulations, what type of KYC information is required by each, and what information institutions are allowed to share in each jurisdiction. How correspondent banks analyze the available information will remain up to the financial institution itself, as SWIFT will not have any involvement in any type of judgmental activities such as due diligence, screening, risk scoring or recommendations about the closure of business relationships.

Initially the KYC Registry will only accept documentation from the correspondent banking industry. However, all SWIFT users can access the information in the registry, provided that the particular SWIFT user is authorized by the financial institution to access its information. Non-SWIFT users will not have access to the KYC Registry.