Over the past two years, SWIFT has run successful proof of concepts with payment infrastructures in Singapore, Australia and Europe.
A pilot between SWIFT, global financial institutions and UK Faster Payments has demonstrated that cross-border payments can be cleared and settled in a matter of seconds using SWIFT’s gpi instant payments service.
Since going live in 2017, SWIFT gpi has removed many common frictions experienced in cross-border payments. It has run successful proof of concepts with market infrastructures in Singapore, Australia and Europe over the past two years.
The latest pilot involved six banks including Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, DBS, Wells Fargo and BBVA; and saw over 40 payments sent at an average time of around one minute.
The fastest payment was sent from Australia to a UK beneficiary with confirmation of credit and funds available in just 36 seconds.
“A lot of people have heard about our ambition for consistent, frictionless transactions, account to account, anywhere in the world, and SWIFT gpi instant really is the glue that allows a large part of that vision to come alive,” said Vikesh Patel, Head of UK & Ireland at SWIFT.
SWIFT has recently announced a new gpi initiative that will make low-value cross-border payments faster, easier, more predictable and competitively priced for SMEs and consumers.
In a new whitepaper, SWIFT says “gpi payments deliver same-day use of funds, end-to-end tracking and final confirmation of credit – together with full transparency on fees charged.”
Today, almost 4,000 financial institutions and 80 market infrastructures are gpi-enabled. In 2019, gpi payments worth USD 77 trillion were processed (compared to USD 40 trillion in 2018), representing 65 percent of all cross-border (MT 103) messages sent over SWIFT.
The paper describes SWIFT’s work with its community to tackle many of the key frictions inherent in cross-border transactions, making payments faster, fully traceable and transparent through gpi.
“Thanks to its benefits and ease-of-use, gpi is now also seeing strong take-up in domestic wholesale and retail markets,” the paper says.
The full paper is available for download here.
