31th Sibos Forum took place in Hong Kong, September, 14-18, 2009 and gathered approximately 10 thousand participants represented over 185 organizations such as banks, financial corporations and software developers and vendors. There were held special session devoted to the workers' remittances.
Mr. Igor Efremov made a report entitled "Remittances: Why do consumers choose non-banking services?". It was dedicated to the main trends in the market of workers' remittances in the world, the CIS and Russia and demonstrated an assessment of the work results of a Workers' Remittance Advisory Group (WRAG) organized by the SWIFT on the approval of new transmission formats information between banks on remittances. RUSSLAVBANK developing the CONTACT System is the one Russian bank-participant of this group participated by 30 banks from around the world including such world market majors like Standard Chartered Bank, City Group and etc.

The leaders and representatives of large European and American banks and SWIFT participated in the debate resulted by the report. Experts of banking community expressed their solidarity with the reporter in challenge to enhance the range of the transmission formats. Participants of SWIFT WRAG talked about their plans for further development of the SWIFTNet Workers' Remittance Project in the light of comments and suggestions of Vice President of RUSSLAVBANK.