Swift has announced that it has implementation plans in place with four of Australia’s major banks to implement is gpi service.
The four banks named, being Commonwealth Bank, Westpac Bank, ANZ Bank and National Australia Bank have all been reportedly signed up to go live or planning the implementation phases.
SWIFT gpi seeks to improve the customer experience in cross-border payments by increasing the speed, transparency and end-to-end tracking of cross-border payments.
Over 110 transaction banks from Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Americas are already signed up to use the service and more are expected to join. Thousands of cross-border payments are today being sent using this new standard, bringing immediate benefits to gpi banks and their corporate customers.
Now live, the first phase of SWIFT gpi focuses on business-to-business payments, helping corporates grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies. Thanks to SWIFT gpi, corporates can today receive an enhanced payments service from their banks, with following key features:
- Faster, same day use of funds*
- Transparency of fees
- End-to-end payments tracking
- Remittance information transferred unaltered
The second phase of SWIFT gpi will enable the digital transformation of cross-border payments, by allowing banks to:
- Immediately stop a payment, no matter where it is in the correspondent banking chain.
- Transfer rich payment data along with the payment, including additional line item details necessary for compliance checks, in an effort to enhance the reconciliation of a payment with multiple invoices.
- Use an international payment assistant, to further increase the straight-through-processing rate of cross-border payments, at origination.
For its third phase, SWIFT gpi is already exploring the potential of using new technologies such as distributed ledger technology, in the cross-border payments process.
The announcement is related to SWIFT’s release of a cross-border payments tracker on May 23rd. Since then, gpi service has been used by more than 20 global transaction banks.