1. Who owns Fides Treasury Services Ltd.?
Fides Treasury Services Ltd. is to 100% owned by the Credit Suisse Group AG. It is wholly owned, but an independently operating subsidiary of Credit Suisse Group AG, offering services in the field of treasury, cash management and payments to large and medium-sized companies that operate on an international or global level.
2. Is Fides Treasury Services Ltd. a bank?
As a subsidiary of Credit Suisse, Fides acts as a member of the Credit Suisse Group and as such considered as a bank. Credit Suisse created a specific BIC code, CRESCHZF, to identify its subsidiary Fides. Under this model, Fides Treasury Services Ltd. operates within the Credit Suisse Group like any other transaction bank under the traditional 'forwarding' or 'agent' bank model whereby they send payment instructions on the behalf of a costumer to another bank (MT101) and receive account statements on behalf of their costumers from another bank (MT940). To set up such a forwarding scheme, the account servicing bank needs to set up agreements with its clients as well as with Fides.
3. Does Fides Treasury Services Ltd. operate as a service bureau?
Yes. Although Fides Treasury Services Ltd. is part of the Credit Suisse Group, we operate independently from Credit Suisse AG. This is also valid for our technical infrastructure. Fides Treasury Services Ltd. has moved the BIC away from Credit Suisse messaging infrastructure and set up it's own SAA/SAG based infrastructure in Zurich. In order to keep operations completely separate, SWIFT has created a service bureau code for Fides Treasury Services Ltd. The BIC is licensed on the new infrastructure at Fides and operated by Fides. With this new set-up Fides Treasury Services Ltd. can provide any corporate or bank a SWIFT connectivity via our service bureau.
4. Is Fides Treasury Services Ltd. a SWIFT Member Concentrator?
Credit Suisse AG is the official member concentrator, but it outsourced all the member concentrator operations to Fides Treasury Services Ltd.
5. What do the branch codes CRESCHZFARS and CRESCHZFEFT refer to?
These branch codes refer to two distinct services, that Fides offers. They are used for internal routing purposes.
ARS = Account Reporting Service for the collection of accounting data from banks (i.e. MT940, BAI, etc.). Fides Treasury Services Ltd. converts and validates the received statement data.
EFT = Electronic File Transfer for the disbursement of payment instructions to banks (i.e. MT101, etc.). A client can place orders in one single, uniform way - encrypted and secured by electronic signatures - to all his banks. Fides undertakes the processing and routing to each bank. Our data validation and enrichment services will ensure that the forwarded instructions will be in the quality required and defined in the Service Level Agreement with the respective bank.
Both services can be operated either on their own or in a coordinated way.
6. Is Fides Treasury Services Ltd. checking all the reports/instructions in regard to money laundering, terror-financing and sanctioned regimes?
All reports and instructions processed by Fides are filtered according to the current national and international rules on money laundering, terror-financing and sanctioned regimes.