Financial messaging network Swift has been selected by theAustralian banking community to develop the country’s new payments platformthat will help the banking community provide real time payments and new andexciting features to tens of millions of customers. While the selection ofSwift is great news for the financial messaging network and Fiserv which willserve as the subcontractor, some of the leading banks have backed outtemporarily likely delaying the implementation by over a year.
Under the terms of the 12 year contract, Swift will supply adomestic messaging network and payments switch to orchestrate clearing andsettlement flows with Fiserv providing a proxy addressing lookup serviceallowing payment routing based on personal identifiers such as a mobile phonenumber or email address. The first deliverable, the real-time platform isexpected to go live in 2017.
Commenting on the announcement, Alain Raes, chief executive,of Emea and Asia Pacific at Swift, said, “Australia is one of a growing numberof countries looking to implement new domestic payments systems in order toachieve faster and more cost-efficient payments. This is a significant firststep for Swift in this space. We are very excited by the project and lookforward to partnering with the community on this initiative.”
With countries, including the United States closely lookingat investing in real time payment systems, the news and progress in Australiawill be closely monitored in the years to come. For more information on realtime payments and the prospect of their implementation in the U.S. see MercatorAdvisory Group’s Research Report, FasterPayments Coming Soon: The Path to Near Real-Time Payments in the U.S. released in November 2014.
Overview by Tristan Hugo-Webb, Associate Director, International Advisory Service for Mercator Advisory Group
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