SWIFT enables payments to be executed in seconds

Brussels, 24September2019

SWIFT today announces the launch of a new service to deliver global instant payments byintegratinggpi, thecross-borderpayments servicewith real-time service levels, into domestic instant payments systems around the world.

Through acombination of gpi and domestic real-time payments networks,SWIFT, together with gpi banks, will facilitate instant international payments with up-frontfee and Foreign Exchange transparency for senders,while also ensuring ubiquitous availability of instant cross-border payments globally.

These major advances will extend the speed and transparency of gpi deeper into domestic markets, enabling banks to leveragetheir existing investments to deliver a better service to their customers. Integrating gpi, through banks,into domestic real-time payment systems reuses existing cross-border and domestic payments infrastructure, thereby minimising implementation costs and avoiding the complexities of adopting new infrastructure.

The service will be available to all types ofbanks’ end customers, from large multi-nationals to SMEs, and from retail to e-commerce platforms. Itwill ensure they allreap the benefits of a service that gives speed, up-front clarity on fees and, crucially, predictability on when an end beneficiary’s account will be credited.

Several global trials have demonstrated SWIFT’s ability to deliver international payments, end to end in just a few seconds through gpi combined with domestic real-time systems:

·         Successful trials with the New Payments Platform(NPP) in Australia delivered payments between Australia and China in 18 seconds

·         A trial in Singapore with Fast And Secure Transfers (FAST), involving 17 banks across seven countries, saw the fastest payment in just 13 seconds and payments between all continents settled within 25 seconds.

·         And atrial has recently concluded in Europe between the European Central Bank (ECB), SWIFT and a group of 19 banks using the TARGET Instant Payments Settlement (TIPS) platform. The trial conducted tests with 12 banks sending cross-border payments from 9 countries (Australia, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Thailand and United States) into Europe via 5 banks. A speed of 41 seconds has already been achieved in a payment sent from Singapore, cleared via Germany, and credited to the end beneficiary account, with further progress expected as the global instant service is rolled out.

Harry Newman, Head of Banking, at SWIFT said: 

“At SWIFT, we are creating a futurein which cross-border payments will be as convenient as domestic ones. It is time for the whole community to come together to seize this opportunity andestablish a global real-time payments service. 

“We will be discussing with the MIs involved in the trials how to progress to live operation and invite all domestic real time payment systems to come and join in this exciting venture. The technology is in place, it is proven and it is now a reality that cross-border payments can be as fast as domestic payments.”  

Shirish Wadivkar, Global Head of Correspondent Banking Products, at Standard Chartered Bank, said: 

“Global commerce in today’s emerging platform economy is increasingly happening in real-time. Customers expect us to move money across borders with a speed to match that. The end-to-end velocity, traceability and transparency of payments is solved with gpi and with this new offering, we aim to capitalise on the 24x7 availability of instant payment systems everywhere, enabling real-time, round-the-clock payment deliveries.”

Tom Halpin, Global Head of Payments Products, Global Liquidity and Cash Management, at HSBC, said:

“We are seeing an acceleration of real-time payment schemes across all markets. The key driver is the modern digital customer who is always connected, values convenience and expects a great experience.  The combination of SWIFT gpi and domestic real-time payments is enabling HSBC to offer that experience across the world.”

Judd Holroyde, Head of Global Product Management at Wells Fargo, said:

“Wells Fargo is committed to the continued advancement of innovation in support of our customers. The SWIFT global instant payment service represents the next generation of SWIFT connectivity with established and emergent real-time schemes around the world. The opportunity to enhance the speed of settlement for customer payments with end-to-end traceability represents an important advancement for the SWIFT community and the customers we serve.”

Ignacio Terol, Deputy Head of Division Market Infrastructure Development at the ECB, said: 

“The trial shows that the 24/7/365 availability of central bank money which TIPS provides can be leveraged not only for instant payments within the EU, but also for  cross-border payments originating beyond the EU. During the trial, the processing time in TIPS was a low as 60 milliseconds. We look forward to working with SWIFT and the TIPS participants on the next steps in this initiative.”

About SWIFT

SWIFT is a global member owned cooperative and the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services. We provide our community with a platform for messaging and standards for communicating, and we offer products and services to facilitate access and integration, identification, analysis and regulatory compliance.

Our messaging platform, products and services connect more than 11,000 banking and securities organisations, market infrastructures and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories. While SWIFT does not hold funds or manage accounts on behalf of customers, we enable our global community of users to communicate securely, exchanging standardised financial messages in a reliable way, thereby supporting global and local financial flows, as well as trade and commerce all around the world.

As their trusted provider, we relentlessly pursue operational excellence; we support our community in addressing cyber threats; and we continually seek ways to lower costs, reduce risks and eliminate operational inefficiencies. Our products and services support our community’s access and integration, business intelligence, reference data and financial crime compliance needs. SWIFT also brings the financial community together – at global, regional and local levels – to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest or concern. SWIFT’s strategic five year plan, SWIFT2020, challenges SWIFT to continue investing in the security, reliability and growth of its core messaging platform, while making additional investments in existing services and delivering new and innovative solutions.

Headquartered in Belgium, SWIFT’s international governance and oversight reinforces the neutral, global character of its cooperative structure. SWIFT’s global office network ensures an active presence in all the major financial centres.

SWIFT gpi

The SWIFT global payments innovation (SWIFT gpi) is the largest change in cross-border payments over the last 30 years and is the new standard. SWIFT gpi dramatically improves the customer experience in cross-border payments by increasing their speed, transparency and end-to-end tracking. Hundreds of thousands of cross-border payments, totalling over $300bn, are sent every day using the new gpi standard. Payments are made quickly, typically within minutes, even seconds.
SWIFT gpi allows corporates to receive an enhanced payments service, with the following key features:

Faster, same day use of funds within the time zone of the receiving gpi member

Transparency of fees

End-to-end payments tracking

Remittance information transferred unaltered

With SWIFT gpi, the correspondent banking community, together with fintechs, corporates, and others, is collectively removing frictions and reducing the costs associated with cross-border payments. Since its launch in January 2017, gpi has dramatically improved the cross-border payments experience for corporates in over 1,100 country corridors. Key features of SWIFT gpi include enhanced business rules and a secure tracking database in the cloud accessible via APIs. New gpi services are routinely developed with the gpi member community and rolled out to the growing network of banks.

Thanks to SWIFT gpi, corporates can grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies. On average, 40% of SWIFT gpi payments are credited to end beneficiaries within 5 minutes. 50% are credited within 30 minutes; 75% within 6 hours; and almost 100% within 24 hours.

Already, 3,500 banks accounting for 85% of SWIFT’s total payments traffic have committed to adopting gpi and more than 55 payment market infrastructures are already exchanging gpi payments, enabling domestic exchange and tracking. Payment market infrastructures have a critical role to play in facilitating the end-to-end tracking of cross-border payments because as soon as international payments hit the destination country, they are typically cleared through local payment infrastructures.

SWIFT leads the industry on Open Banking with library of API standard

Brussels, 5September2019

SWIFT today publishesa new API standard for thePre-authorisation of funds, paving the way for further innovation in financial services enabled by open banking.

The new standard allows a payer’s bank to earmark funds for apurchase in advance, guaranteeing that the future payment will be honoured. It is the second of SWIFT’s Open Banking Extensions API standards,and is the latest addition to a global library of APIsthat SWIFT is building in collaboration with banks, merchants and fintechs.SWIFT published a Pay Later API standard earlier this year.

API standards play an important role in open banking because theyhelp speed the rollout of new services while reducingincremental investment. If each bank offers a distinct API, merchants and fintechs have to adapt to different data structures, workflows and security considerations for each one – adding complexity, cost and time for implementation. SWIFT has long been at the forefront ofbanking standardisation and is well suited to lend its expertise and experience to this work in APIs.

The new Pre-authorisation standard is now available for developers of APIs to adopt and use.

Stephen Lindsay, Head of Standards at SWIFT, said: “SWIFTis uniquely positioned to tackle theproblem of fragmentation in standards globally and we are pleased to expand our current role to include the global standardisation of open banking APIs. Our work on the pre-authorisation of funds API is another example of thecentral partwe are playing in ensuring the industry can make the most of the new open banking landscape.”

Kirstine Nilsson, Head of Business Infrastructure, Consumer Payments & Cash Management, Swedbank said: "In the Nordics we know the benefits of collaboration in the standards space. We have built the world leading BankID service and the Swish payment method. We are now collaborating on the P27 pan-Nordic clearing system. The banking industry must come together for the benefit of the digital economy to standardise retail and wholesale banking APIs. Developers these days don’t want to do host connections or SFTP connections – APIs are the way forward and SWIFT is the perfect body to deliver global consistency."

Hiroshi Kawagoe, General Manager, Transaction Business Planning Department, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation said: “Every country is following the developments of ‘Open Banking’ with great interest, beginning with a regulatory regime designed to catalyse developments.  We can already see that each country is developing their own formats and that sometimes individual banks are developing their own formats.  This kind of fragmentation may not be ideal as the banking industry progressively opens up more advanced services through API.  Therefore, there is a need to discuss standards, just as we have achieved with the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and in many other areas.”

Tony McLaughlin,Managing Director, Treasury and Trade Solutions, Citi said: “The SWIFT Pre-Authorization API is further validation that banks, Fintechs and merchants can collaborate to build Open Banking APIs that go beyond the regulatory minimums to support vitally important use-cases.  The global banking community must come together to provide the full suite of retail and wholesale banking APIs so that we can provide the financial layer of the digital economy. The world of platforms provides unlimited new opportunities for banks if they adopt an ‘API first’ mindset.”

About SWIFT

SWIFT is a global member owned cooperative and the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services. We provide our community with a platform for messaging and standards for communicating, and we offer products and services to facilitate access and integration, identification, analysis and regulatory compliance.

Our messaging platform, products and services connect more than 11,000 banking and securities organisations, market infrastructures and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories. While SWIFT does not hold funds or manage accounts on behalf of customers, we enable our global community of users to communicate securely, exchanging standardised financial messages in a reliable way, thereby supporting global and local financial flows, as well as trade and commerce all around the world.

As their trusted provider, we relentlessly pursue operational excellence; we support our community in addressing cyber threats; and we continually seek ways to lower costs, reduce risks and eliminate operational inefficiencies. Our products and services support our community’s access and integration, business intelligence, reference data and financial crime compliance needs. SWIFT also brings the financial community together – at global, regional and local levels – to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest or concern. SWIFT’s strategic five year plan, SWIFT2020, challenges SWIFT to continue investing in the security, reliability and growth of its core messaging platform, while making additional investments in existing services and delivering new and innovative solutions.

Headquartered in Belgium, SWIFT’s international governance and oversight reinforces the neutral, global character of its cooperative structure. SWIFT’s global office network ensures an active presence in all the major financial centres.

SWIFT launches enhanced gpi service for corporates

New service enables multi-banked corporates to initiate and track payments across all their banking partners

Brussels, 17 July 2019

SWIFT today announces the further enhancement of its gpi service with the full go-live of SWIFT gpi for corporates, a capability designed and built in conjunction with banks and corporates which enables multi-banked corporates to initiate and track payments across multiple banks directly from their treasury and payment systems. More than 50 of the world’s largest companies – including LVMH, Microsoft and Petronas – have already signed up to the service.

The go-live follows a successful pilot with 22 corporates and banks – including Airbus, Booking.com, General Electric, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Societe Generale and Standard Chartered Bank – that collaborated to scope the project, define the standard and business practices, and test the functionality within their treasury systems.

While corporates are already able to check the status of gpi payments through each of their individual banking partners’ portals, SWIFT gpi for corporates addresses the needs of multi-banked corporates, affording them a single centralised and standardised view across all their banking partners. The service allows corporates to track all their payments in real-time, facilitating more accurate reconciliation, and preventing costly and time-consuming investigations.

SWIFT gpi for corporates allows banks to give users visibility, transparency and control of their entire payment flows and provides them with full transparency over fees and FX so that they can identify the most efficient ways to send their payments around the world. Furthermore, it relieves corporates of the need to adapt their systems for each individual bank they work with.

In developing the service, SWIFT worked with banks and corporates as well as with leading treasury software providers including, Bellin, FIS, Kyriba and SAP, all of which have integrated SWIFT gpi for corporates into their applications.

Olivier Valanchauskas, Head of Airbus Treasury Platforms, said: “An increasing number of banks are offering gpi tracking through their individual portals which works well for companies that only work with one bank, but not so much for a multinational business dealing with multiple banks. SWIFT gpi for corporates solves this by creating a centralised view of multi-bank information, enabling us to track our payments all in one place.”

Peter Kim, Senior Manager, Treasury Technology at Google, said: "It is great to see the recent success and adoption of gpi by financial institutions. However, prior to gpi for corporates, SCORE members were required to implement gpi directly with each bank, which limited the value of having direct SWIFT connectivity. Thanks to the launch of gpi for corporates, we will now be able to directly leverage our SWIFT infrastructure to receive the full benefits of gpi. We look forward to getting started!"

“Improving our clients’ ability to enable and track cross-border payments continues to be a key focus of FIS’ corporate treasury offerings,” said Martin Boyd, head of Capital Markets at FIS. “We’re excited to continue our work with SWIFT to create innovative products that are cost effective and improve efficiency and transparency.”

Marc Delbaere, Head of Corporates and Trade at SWIFT, said: “gpi for corporates is the result of ground-breaking collaboration between corporates and banks to revolutionise cross-border payments for corporates. It creates a rule book which standardises and centralises their multi-bank information, providing unrivalled visibility, as well as saving them time and money. Over 50 corporates and banks, including nine of the ten top cash management banks, have already signed up, and we expect this number to grow significantly in the coming months.”

Notes to editors
Institutions signed up
AccessPay	HSBC	Petronas
Air Liquide	Hyundai Glovis	Pingan
Airbus	IATA	Roche
Alstom	ING	RTL Group
Bank of America Merrill Lynch	Intesa Sanpaolo	SABB
Bank of China	J.P. Morgan	Sarens
BBVA	Kyriba	Saudi Aramco
Bellin	LouisDreyfus	Sinochem
BNP Paribas	LVMH	SITA
Booking.com	Maybank	Sumitomo   Mitsui   Banking
Borealis	Microsoft	CorporationSociété Générale
Citi	National Australia Bank	Standard Chartered Bank
Darling	Natixis	Swift Treasury
Deutsche Bank	Naval	Toyota Motors
Deutsche Telekom	Nokia	Unicredit
FIS	Nordex	Unified Post
General Electric	NSG
GTreasury	OpusCapita
About SWIFT

SWIFT is a global member owned cooperative and the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services. We provide our community with a platform for messaging and standards for communicating, and we offer products and services to facilitate access and integration, identification, analysis and regulatory compliance.

Our messaging platform, products and services connect more than 11,000 banking and securities organisations, market infrastructures and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories. While SWIFT does not hold funds or manage accounts on behalf of customers, we enable our global community of users to communicate securely, exchanging standardised financial messages in a reliable way, thereby supporting global and local financial flows, as well as trade and commerce all around the world.

As their trusted provider, we relentlessly pursue operational excellence; we support our community in addressing cyber threats; and we continually seek ways to lower costs, reduce risks and eliminate operational inefficiencies. Our products and services support our community’s access and integration, business intelligence, reference data and financial crime compliance needs. SWIFT also brings the financial community together – at global, regional and local levels – to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest or concern. SWIFT’s strategic five year plan, SWIFT2020, challenges SWIFT to continue investing in the security, reliability and growth of its core messaging platform, while making additional investments in existing services and delivering new and innovative solutions.

Headquartered in Belgium, SWIFT’s international governance and oversight reinforces the neutral, global character of its cooperative structure. SWIFT’s global office network ensures an active presence in all the major financial centres.

SWIFT gpi

The SWIFT global payments innovation (SWIFT gpi) is the largest change in cross-border payments over the last 30 years and is the new standard. SWIFT gpi dramatically improves the customer experience in cross-border payments by increasing their speed, transparency and end-to-end tracking. Hundreds of thousands of cross-border payments, totalling over $300bn, are sent every day using the new gpi standard. Payments are made quickly, typically within minutes, even seconds.

SWIFT gpi allows corporates to receive an enhanced payments service, with the following key features:

• Faster, same day use of funds within the time zone of the receiving gpi member

• Transparency of fees

• End-to-end payments trackin

• Remittance information transferred unaltered

With SWIFT gpi, the correspondent banking community, together with fintechs, corporates, and others, is collectively removing frictions and reducing the costs associated with cross-border payments. Since its launch in January 2017, gpi has dramatically improved the cross-border payments experience for corporates in over 1,100 country corridors. Key features of SWIFT gpi include enhanced business rules and a secure tracking database in the cloud accessible via APIs. New gpi services are routinely developed with the gpi member community and rolled out to the growing network of banks.

Thanks to SWIFT gpi, corporates can grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies. On average, 40% of SWIFT gpi payments are credited to end beneficiaries within 5 minutes. 50% are credited within 30 minutes; 75% within 6 hours; and almost 100% within 24 hours.

Already, 3,500 banks accounting for 85% of SWIFT’s total payments traffic have committed to adopting gpi and more than 55 payment market infrastructures are already exchanging gpi payments, enabling domestic exchange and tracking. Payment market infrastructures have a critical role to play in facilitating the end-to-end tracking of cross-border payments because as soon as international payments hit the destination country, they are typically cleared through local payment infrastructures.

SWIFT publishes paper on the future of payments

Brussels/Mumbai,20 June2019

SWIFT has today releaseda landmark paper, “Payments: looking to the future”, in which the global co-operative articulates the future of cross-border payments. Withthe increase in cross-border flows, new technology enabling dramatic improvementsand end-customers demanding a better customer experience, SWIFT is setting out its views on the future of cross-border payments in order to support the community. 

SWIFT’s view of the future is deceptively simple: to make cross-border payments real-time, 24/7 and as seamless, convenient, cost-efficient and accessible as domestic payments.

The paper lays out the elements and dynamics supporting the revolution in international payments, including:

·         A core infrastructure, that responds to the challenge of bridging the ‘closed loops’ of individual payments systems and securely unlocks value across borders, supporting trade and economic growth

·         The widespread adoption of SWIFT gpi, which will be the universal standard by 2020, making every cross-border payment fast,transparent, traceable and truly global– unlocking value from every account, to every account

·         A hyper-connected future, in which gpi-enabled banks are the bridges between real-time domestic payments infrastructures, enabling instant cross border payments to move seamlessly and safely across borders via SWIFT

·         Smarter payments which utilise superior data and the power of AI and machine learning for effective and efficient financial crime compliance and to eliminate the hold-ups and bottlenecks caused by missing or incorrect information 

·         Modern, open, globally adopted standards, which allow smaller markets to internationalise faster andlarger markets to fluidly transfer value through the entire payments chain

·         Further embracing new technologies that serve a real purpose to resolve industry problems through the deployment of cutting edge technology

·         A vibrant and innovative ecosystem, with API technologies supporting open, agilearchitectures that allow fintechs to offer value-add services and banks to differentiate themselves by layering services and products

At SWIFT, our vision is to make cross-border payments as seamless and convenient as domestic ones. This vision is shared by Indian banks that are embracing gpi as the new norm of cross-border payments. Twelve banks have already signed up for gpi in India with more to come. The hyper-connected future of tomorrow could see us enabling seamless cross-border payment experience via domestic real-time systems without the need for beneficiary bank account information, for example. Open banking, which will play a big role in this experience, is something that SWIFT is building capabilities around. We are extending services using APIs and more crucially enabling harmonisation of the API standards by leveraging ISO 20022 to ensure that our payment processing is frictionless and secure. Innovation is and will continue to play a huge part in what we do,” said Kiran Shetty, CEO and Regional Head, India and South Asia, SWIFT

Payments are not an end in themselves – they exist to enable investment, trade and commerce. By laying out this industry roadmap, SWIFT aims to galvanise the global payments community – market infrastructures, banks and fintechs – to collaborate and help drive progress, ensuring cross-border payments better serve market needs.

SWIFT gpi

The SWIFT global payments innovation (SWIFT gpi) is the largest change in cross-border payments over the last 30 years and is the new standard. SWIFT gpi dramatically improves the customer experience in cross-border payments by increasing their speed, transparency and end-to-end tracking. Hundreds of thousands of cross-border payments, totalling over $300bn, are sent every day using the new gpi standard. Payments are made quickly, typically within minutes, even seconds.

SWIFT gpi allows corporates to receive an enhanced payments service, with the following key features:

• Faster, same day use of funds within the time zone of the receiving gpi member

• Transparency of fees

• End-to-end payments tracking

• Remittance information transferred unaltered

With SWIFT gpi, the correspondent banking community, together with fintechs, corporates, and others, is collectively removing frictions and reducing the costs associated with cross-border payments. Since its launch in January 2017, gpi has dramatically improved the cross-border payments experience for corporates in over 1,100 country corridors. Key features of SWIFT gpi include enhanced business rules and a secure tracking database in the cloud accessible via APIs. New gpi services are routinely developed with the gpi member community and rolled out to the growing network of banks.

Thanks to SWIFT gpi, corporates can grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies.On average, 40% of SWIFT gpi payments are credited to end beneficiaries within 5 minutes. 50% are credited within 30 minutes; 75% within 6 hours; and almost 100% within 24 hours.

Already, 3,500 banks accounting for 85% of SWIFT’s total payments traffic have committed to adopting gpi and more than 55 payment market infrastructures are already exchanging gpi payments, enabling domestic exchange and tracking. Payment market infrastructures have a critical role to play in facilitating the end-to-end tracking of cross-border payments because as soon as international payments hit the destination country, they are typically cleared through local payment infrastructures.

About SWIFT

SWIFT is a global member owned cooperative and the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services. We provide our community with a platform for messaging and standards for communicating, and we offer products and services to facilitate access and integration, identification, analysis and regulatory compliance.

Our messaging platform, products and services connect more than 11,000 banking and securities organisations, market infrastructures and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories. While SWIFT does not hold funds or manage accounts on behalf of customers, we enable our global community of users to communicate securely, exchanging standardised financial messages in a reliable way, thereby supporting global and local financial flows, as well as trade and commerce all around the world.

As their trusted provider, we relentlessly pursue operational excellence; we support our community in addressing cyber threats; and we continually seek ways to lower costs, reduce risks and eliminate operational inefficiencies. Our products and services support our community’s access and integration, business intelligence, reference data and financial crime compliance needs. SWIFT also brings the financial community together – at global, regional and local levels – to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest or concern. SWIFT’s strategic five year plan, SWIFT2020, challenges SWIFT to continue investing in the security, reliability and growth of its core messaging platform, while making additional investments in existing services and delivering new and innovative solutions.

Headquartered in Belgium, SWIFT’s international governance and oversight reinforces the neutral, global character of its cooperative structure. SWIFT’s global office network ensures an active presence 

SWIFT extends integrated payments toolkit

Brussels,2May 2019

SWIFTannounces the launch of an ‘in-flight’payment investigation and resolutionservice, available in the cloud,in a significant expansion of its network-wide payments validation toolkit. The new capability allows for dynamic query handling between banks on the SWIFT network, enablingthem to quickly resolve instances in which required operational, regulatory or compliance information is incorrect or missing from payment instructions.

This latest development complements SWIFT’s integrated gpi pre-validation service, which is aimed at identifying and eliminating errors and omissions in payment messages, prior to payment initiation. Integrated directly into SWIFT gpi, the serviceswill ultimately be made available to all 10,000 banks across the SWIFT network.

Harry Newman, Head of Banking at SWIFT, said:“In our drive towards frictionless payments, we are working together with banks and software providers to bring in a fully integrated, network-wide service to ensure a smooth payments process. It has been a consistent bug-bear of many banks that, whilst only a minority of payments are held up by errors and missing information, they are frustrating, time-consuming and costly. Ultimately all 10,000banks on the network will be able to use these tools seamlessly to resolve them.”

The newservicewill speed up the resolution of operational, compliance andregulatory-relatedissues that can arise along the payments chain.While relatively infrequent, these issues can currently take a long time to resolve. Such issues can arise from missing or incorrect information – such as the reason for payment or settlement date, or differences in regulatory controls and requirements across jurisdictions –all of whichrequire additional information and validation.

Interbank efforts to resolve these blockages often involve multiple requests and responses across chains of banks. The use of unstructured, unstandardised messagesprevents automated processing, resulting in time-consuming and costly processes.

Available in the cloud, and through a combination of the gpi tracking function and standardised industry protocols, the service will improve transparency, shorten resolution time and reduce the need for manual interventions. Users will be able to locate any hold-ups via the gpi tracker, as well as identify the beneficiary or intermediary banks that may be causing them. Using API calls, and the gpi tracker, they will then be able to automatically exchange the required information directly with the relevant banks. For smaller users, a GUI will be provided to handle the case requests and responses.

Using a standardised ISO 20022 format,the banks will be able to exchange requests and responses in a structuredmanner –thereby ensuring more efficient case resolution.Facilitating 14 enquiry types and covering three payment types (customer credit transfers, financial institution transfers, cover payments) the architecture is designed to make the service future-proof and extendable to cover any field of any payments message.

Mark McNulty, Global Head Clearing & FI Payments at Citi, said:“In addition to our goal of providing real-time ubiquitous cross-border payments, our ambition is to ensure that any associated customer enquiries are transacted real-time. gpicase resolution is a very important step forward as it provides the platform for banks, across the payment chain, to interact in a far more dynamic, efficient and transparent manner than today and thus ultimately better serve our clients. Case resolution is well placed to build on the scale and reach of gpi to transform how enquiries associated with cross-border payments are resolved.”

Peng Hua, Deputy General Manager, Operation Management Department at Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, said: “ICBC is extremely willing to participate in the application and promotion of the SWIFT gpi case resolution service as a market forerunner. It can be predicted that through the implementation of SWIFT gpi case resolution service, banks can achieve rapid exchange of standardised investigation information, improve the efficiency of requests and responses and provide customers with premium cross-border clearing service and outstanding structured resolution.”

Jean-François Mazure, Head of cash clearing services atSocieteGenerale, said: “SocieteGenerale is enthusiastic to be taking part in another SWIFT gpi initiative. This new service streamlines the investigation process and definitively accelerates the resolution of cases. This fits in perfectly with the banking industry’s innovation dynamic that constantly strives to improve service quality as well as optimise operational costs.”

In the first stage of its launch, the service will be piloted by 12 major banks and three case management software providers. The 12 banks taking part in the pilot are Bank of China, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Emirates NBD, Gazprombank, HSBC, ICBC, SMBC (Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation), SocieteGenerale andStandard Chartered. The three case management software providers taking part are Appian, Pega and Syracom. The serviceis scheduledto go live inNovember 2019.

SWIFT gpi

The SWIFT global payments innovation (SWIFT gpi) is the largest change in cross-border payments over the last 30 years and is the new standard. SWIFT gpi dramatically improves the customer experience in cross-border payments by increasing their speed, transparency and end-to-end tracking. Hundreds of thousands of cross-border payments, totalling over $300bn, are sent every day using the new gpi standard. Payments are made quickly, typically within minutes, even seconds.

SWIFT gpi allows corporates to receive an enhanced payments service, with the following key features:

• Faster, same day use of funds within the time zone of the receiving gpi member

• Transparency of fees

• End-to-end payments tracking

• Remittance information transferred unaltered

With SWIFT gpi, the correspondent banking community, together with fintechs, corporates, and others, is collectively removing frictions and reducing the costs associated with cross-border payments. Since its launch in January 2017, gpi has dramatically improved the cross-border payments experience for corporates in over 1,100 country corridors. Key features of SWIFT gpi include enhanced business rules and a secure tracking database in the cloud accessible via APIs. New gpi services are routinely developed with the gpi member community and rolled out to the growing network of banks.

Thanks to SWIFT gpi, corporates can grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies.On average, 40% of SWIFT gpi payments are credited to end beneficiaries within 5 minutes. 50% are credited within 30 minutes; 75% within 6 hours; and almost 100% within 24 hours.

Already, 3,500 banks accounting for 85% of SWIFT’s total payments traffic have committed to adopting gpi and more than 55 payment market infrastructures are already exchanging gpi payments, enabling domestic exchange and tracking. Payment market infrastructures have a critical role to play in facilitating the end-to-end tracking of cross-border payments because as soon as international payments hit the destination country, they are typically cleared through local payment infrastructures.

About SWIFT

SWIFT is a global member owned cooperative and the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services. We provide our community with a platform for messaging and standards for communicating, and we offer products and services to facilitate access and integration, identification, analysis and regulatory compliance.

Our messaging platform, products and services connect more than 11,000 banking and securities organisations, market infrastructures and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories. While SWIFT does not hold funds or manage accounts on behalf of customers, we enable our global community of users to communicate securely, exchanging standardised financial messages in a reliable way, thereby supporting global and local financial flows, as well as trade and commerce all around the world.

As their trusted provider, we relentlessly pursue operational excellence; we support our community in addressing cyber threats; and we continually seek ways to lower costs, reduce risks and eliminate operational inefficiencies. Our products and services support our community’s access and integration, business intelligence, reference data and financial crime compliance needs. SWIFT also brings the financial community together – at global, regional and local levels – to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest or concern. SWIFT’s strategic five year plan, SWIFT2020, challenges SWIFT to continue investing in the security, reliability and growth of its core messaging platform, while making additional investments in existing services and delivering new and innovative solutions.

Headquartered in Belgium, SWIFT’s international governance and oversight reinforces the neutral, global character of its cooperative structure. SWIFT’s global office network ensures an active presence in all the major financial centres.