by Suman Gupta
SWIFT 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 multibanked 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 crossborder 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.”
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.
