SWIFT, along with a number of corporates and banks, today announces plans to start testing an enhanced multi-bank standard to further improve the cross-border payments experience for multi-banked corporates.

This enhanced standard, designed and built in conjunction with 10multinational corporates and 12 leading banks, streamlines the process for corporate treasurers by allowing them to initiate and track gpi payments to and from multiple banks in a single format and integrate gpi flows in ERP and Treasury Management Systems.

The first-of-its kind, this cross-industry collaboration tailors SWIFT’s global payments innovation (gpi) for multi-banked corporates, by introducing a common solution delivered in the same way by all gpi banks.

This new standard will enable application providers and banks to give corporates better visibility and transparency, improving payments certainty, traceability, exception handling and allowing them to reconcile directly in their treasury operations.

Pilot participants are to begin a test phase ahead of bringing this flow into production in the next few months.

Corporates and banks participating in the pilot include Airbus, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Booking.com, Borealis, Citi, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, IATA, Intesa Sanpaolo, J.P. Morgan, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Microsoft, National Australia Bank, Ping An Group, Roche, RTL Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Société Générale, Standard Chartered Bank and UniCredit.

Together with the pilot participants SWIFT has invited leading treasury application providers to integrate the gpi flows into their own systems in order to deliver a fully embedded gpi experience in corporate treasury systems.

Lisa Wagner, group treasury manager at Microsoft said: “The ability to access a greater level of payment information in a timely manner through SWIFT gpi will bring immediate benefits to our payments experience with greater transparency and responsiveness to our vendors.  Providing multi-bank information all in one place and in the same format fits into our modern finance roadmap.”

“We are very pleased to participate in the SWIFT gpi for Corporates pilot,” said Martin Schlageter, head of Treasury Operations at Roche.  “There are many challenges to tackle with cross-border payments but SWIFT gpi, combined with the broader SWIFT for Corporates programme, will bring considerable benefits to improving the transparency and visibility of our cross-border payments.”

The standard design has been developed through a series of SWIFT-led co-creation workshops with pilot banks and corporates. It supports FIN & ISO 20022 standards to allow corporates to access their payments status across SWIFT and bank proprietary channels.

”Corporates want to track payments in real time and get confirmation of credit to the beneficiary’s account,” says Marc Delbaere, global head of Corporates at SWIFT. “This new multi-bank capability will enable that experience in a consistent fashion, across multiple banks and multiple corporates. Having this information instantly in the corporate treasury space is what corporate customers are asking for.”

Launched in early 2017, gpi already has over 180 banks signed up, and accounts for nearly 30% of SWIFT cross-border payment traffic. More than 100 billion USD in SWIFT gpi messages is sent every day, enabling payments to be credited to end beneficiaries within minutes – many within seconds.

To date, 35 million gpi payments have been sent across 450 country corridors, in more than 100 currencies. In major corridors, such as USA-China, gpi already accounts for nearly 50 per cent of payment traffic. – TradeArabia News Service