This PaymentsSource article describes how SWIFT expects to pivot into more transactional services beyond financial messaging in order to support the more modern demands of the banking community. This is especially designed for enhancing the cross-border use cases, where lots of innovation has been underway for several years.
Some readers may recall the various public challenges over the past few years regarding the use of blockchain networks in trade situations. It has yet to materialize into anything scalable but nonetheless continues to gain traction.
‘Swift’s latest strategy comes four years after it established the Global Payments Innovation service to address the need for all banks in the network to follow similar standards, communication procedures and preparations for technology advancements. In many ways, GPI was Swift’s way of saying it was time to get the most out of legacy systems, so that new technology and procedures could operate in tandem….“We are innovating the underlying infrastructure that financial institutions use to make transactions run even faster end-to-end, and at the same time further reducing costs for the community through industry-shared services in the areas of cyber, fraud and compliance,” Swift CEO Javier Perez-Tasso said in a Thursday press release. “We will introduce data innovation that embeds risk and control elements expected from Swift, creating peace of mind for business-critical operations.”
Mercator Advisory Group recently covered the B2B cross-border space in a member viewpoint and, of course, we discussed the SWIFT gpi initiative, as well as the transition to ISO 20022, along with various other industry innovations. We have not received a briefing on this announcement, which is rather general in nature, but the direction seems logical and comes at a time of management transition, so it makes sense to us.
‘Last year, Swift expanded the GPI service to corporations, allowing those businesses to initiate and track payments across multiple banking partners from a single source….“Citi is very supportive of this new path that Swift is embarking on,” Manish Kohli, global head of payments and receivables at Citi, said in the release. “With its new platform strategy, Swift is evolving from just making incremental improvements to its traditional store and forward messaging capabilities and towards truly transformative change based on API dynamic connectivity, a vastly improved data model and extremely relevant ‘payment orchestration’ services.”…The “reimagined Swift platform” builds on the progress of GPI, and moves network banks toward payment ubiquity with the ability to make frictionless and instant cross-border payments across the network, Kohli added.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
