“The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) disclosed on Tuesday a partnership with fintech company Symbiont to provide more accurate data for financial firms through blockchain technology.  Vanguard, Citigroup, American Century Investments and Northern Trust are among the companies participating in the initiative. According to the announcement, the pilot project “could help providers distribute data in near real time to global custody clients.” Through Assembly, Symbiont’s proprietary technology platform and smart contracts will be used “to create a network effect that leverages the 11,000+ institutions connected to SWIFT globally.””

“The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) disclosed on Tuesday a partnership with fintech company Symbiont to provide more accurate data for financial firms through blockchain technology.  Vanguard, Citigroup, American Century Investments, and Northern Trust are among the companies participating in the initiative. According to the announcement, the pilot project “could help providers distribute data in near real time to global custody clients.” Through Assembly, Symbiont’s proprietary technology platform, smart contracts will be used “to create a network effect that leverages the 11,000+ institutions connected to SWIFT globally.”

“As part of its ambitious strategy for instant and frictionless transactions, SWIFT today announces a new capability that uses its global intelligence on past cross-border flows to predict potential problems before new international payments are sent. The new service analyses previous flows on the SWIFT network to identify accounts that have been credited successfully and uses this information to detect potential errors in payee information – the most common cause of cross-border delays. This centralised verification, based on aggregated and anonymised data from 9 billion transaction messages between 4 billion accounts each year, provides a level of insight no single financial institution has on its own and gives real-time confidence that a payment will go through, regardless of whether the parties or banks in a transaction have transacted with each other before.”

“SWIFT has announced a service that applies predictive analytics to cross-border payments data to pre-empt potential errors before a payment is executed.This solution analyses previous payments transactions conducted over the SWIFT network, on an aggregated and anonymised basis, to identify potential errors in payee details and other trade information that may cause the payment to fail or be processed incorrectly.It is an extension of SWIFT’s Payment Pre-validation services and is available to banks via application programming interface, or API.”

“International Payments are moving to the blockchain (ISO 20022): Many cryptocurrency investors are looking to reap massive returns as the 50-year-old international payments system moves onto the blockchain beginning in November 2022. This is part of what is known as ISO 20022, a single standardization approach to be used by all financial standards initiatives. The new standardization is set to officially begin in November 2022 and be fully implemented by November 2025. There are many cryptocurrencies that will be integrated into this new financial system, referred to as ISO 20022 compliment cryptocurrencies and there is much speculation these cryptocurrencies will soar in price once the standard is implemented. 45.8 million Transactions per day – This is how many transactions the existing international payment systems handle.”

“Global payment giant SWIFT determined its 2022 hackathon theme as “Digital assets: exploring interoperability and ownership” as it hopes to bring the brightest of the industry together to collaborate and innovate on digital assets. The company acknowledged the significance of digital assets for the future of finance by stating: “Digital assets are a key topic on the innovation agenda, as many leading forces in the industry know.” SWIFT also said that it has been experimenting with digital assets on its own and with major industry players. The company hopes to take its efforts further with the 2022 hackathon.”

“International payments are fundamental to global trade and business as we know it today. Without an efficient cross-border transfer system, businesses and their banking partners stand to lose significant capital. Yet for decades, the day-to-day challenges of managing cross-border payments have plagued us. Delays, hidden fees, failed transfers, limited access and a lack of transparency throughout the chain have all contributed to making international transfers problematic and at times costly, slowing business and hindering relations. In 2020, under the request of the G20, the Financial Stability Board created a roadmap to improve cross-border payments, with key targets including increased data quality, steps to coordinate regulatory frameworks and research into new and existing payment infrastructure. Yet issues still remain, and many banks and corporates continue to struggle. At Bank of the West – a subsidiary of BNP Paribas headquartered in San Francisco – we’ve signed up to SWIFT global payments innovation (gpi) to help alleviate the most pressing of these challenges. The multi-year SWIFT gpi initiative has been rolled out in stages by the global banking community with one goal: to improve the cross-border payments experience for both senders and recipients.”

“We’ve [Swift] extended our Case Management product suite beyond just gpi-enabled banks. That means that everyone in our community can now benefit from our Stop and Recall and Case Resolution services. Within the world of payments, things don’t always go to plan. Whether that’s an incorrect account number that needs to be repaired or a fraudulent transaction that needs to be reversed. And too often these exceptions and investigations can be time consuming, taking hours of back and forth just to get clarity on the status of a payment. For every minute that an investigation takes, it’s the end-customer who ends up waiting longer for their money….By extending Case Management to our entire community, non-gpi banks can now fully benefit from both Case Resolution and Stop and Recall. This brings us one step closer to our goal of a frictionless, industry-wide solution for exceptions and investigations.”

“Bottomline (NASDAQ:EPAY), a leading provider of financial technology that makes business payments simple, smart and secure, today announced the latest API-based payments tracking service for banks worldwide, integrating SWIFT gpi data. The gpi data is captured on behalf of Bottomline clients and is integrated into their payments workflow, which simplifies and unifies the API access points.”

“Oracle Banking Payments is supporting SWIFT’s latest service to make global cross-border payments fast, easy, predictable, and frictionless for small and medium enterprises (SME) and consumer markets…As banks are managing their ISO 20022 migrations and implementing new services within the gpi program, Oracle aims to lower the total cost of ownership and ease customers’ transition by investing in its solutions and supporting key industry initiatives. With Oracle Banking Payments’ built-in integration with the new SWIFT service, banks will be able to minimize disruption to customers’ existing technology infrastructure to meet dynamic cross-border payment needs and lower the total cost of ownership.”

“Bank of China, Bank of New York Mellon, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered confirmed their preparations for the platform as the co-operative detailed an ambitious roadmap it will roll out over the next 18 months. New features – including upfront validation of beneficiary details, central management of exceptions, extension of SWIFT’s high-speed gpi rails to lower-value payments and new rich data services based on the ISO 20022 standard – will serve as the building blocks of the enhanced platform. These are integral components of SWIFT’s strategy to facilitate instant and frictionless end-to-end transactions anywhere in the world.”

“SWIFT’s KYC Registry will become the first global utility to integrate the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) Sustainable Trade Finance Guidelines, making it easier for financial institutions to identify environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks in their supply chains. By integrating the ICC’s Sustainable Trade Finance Guidelines into the KYC Registry , which has more than 6,000 users, financial institutions will benefit from enhanced transparency and will be able to assess the sustainability of their customers’ trade business more accurately.”

“Since the moment that SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) launched its global payment initiative SWIFT gpi , BBVA was one of the first ten banks in the world to join . Since then, the bank has remained firmly committed to this new standard for interbank payments. Some of its benefits include greater speed, transparency, tracking from start to finish and access to additional information on the transfers.”

“Being the first US bank to offer gpi case resolution to their clients, BNY Mellon is leading the way in automating payment processes, reducing the costs and time associated with managing payment inquiries. This solution will vastly improve the time to resolve an inquiry, ensuring invoices are paid on time, reducing fraud, and better meeting client expectations. Ultimately, creating straight-through processing for inquiries has been long overdue and will eventually become the global standard.”

“SWIFT today announces a major milestone in the take-up of gpi with more than $40trn transferred over the service in 2018. Rapid adoption saw the share of cross-border messages using gpi soar from 15% at the start of 2018, to 56% by the end of the year, a year-on-year increase of 270%. More than 3,500 banks, accounting for 85% of SWIFT’s total payments traffic, have committed to adopting gpi, evidencing how the service has achieved the near total transformation of the cross-border payments landscape just two years since launch.”

“Financial messaging network Swift is to give member banks deeper insights into their cross-border payment flows with the release of a ‘Business Intelligence gpi Observer Analytics’ tool. The dashboard monitors the progress of gpi payments crossing the network at country, country corridor, and currency level, providing banks with the opportunity to optimise payment routings and benchmark their performance against other participants.”

“SWIFT is to introduce a pre-validation service that will allow customers to detect and resolve errors that delay payment messages before they are dispatched and enable banks to give upfront fee transparency to their end customers.”

“UK-based Ebury has become the first fintech to be a full and active participant on gpi, Swift’s cross-border payments scheme. The move has been hailed as “an important milestone” by Swift which is looking to encourage new non-bank entrants to join the traditional banks already on the service.”