Increasing adoption of SWIFT gpi has resulted in over $40trn being transferred over the service in 2018. As a result, the share of cross-border messages using gpi soared from 15% at the start of 2018, to 56% by the end of the year.
More than 3,500 banks have committed to adopting gpi, which promised to transform the cross-border payments landscape by speed and certainty, whilst encouraging cross-sector collaboration and innovation. SWIFT gpi now carries over $300bn a day in 148 currencies across more than 1,100 country corridors. SWIFT adds that:
- On average, 40% of SWIFT gpi payments are credited to end beneficiaries within five minutes
- half are credited within 30 minutes
- three quarters within six hours
- almost 100% within 24 hours
- in addition, 99% of traffic on some major country corridors – such as US-China – is processed using gpi.
One bank to embrace gpi is JP Morgan. Emma Loftus, head of global payments for the bank’s Treasury Services, said: “SWIFT gpi delivered on the promise of greater payment transparency and predictability, highlighting how banks and industry collaboration can quickly deliver innovation.
“For years, clients have asked their banks for end-to-end transparency which is easy to use, understand, and implement. With 76% of our payments now being executed via gpi, we are experiencing direct benefits in our ability to respond to client enquiries. Processes that have taken days are being now completed within seconds.”
Thomas W. Halpin, Global Head of Payments Product Management, HSBC, added: “We are always looking for ways to provide customers with greater speed, certainty, transparency and traceability for their payments. Since integrating SWIFT gpi into our customer-facing portals and digital tools, thousands of our customers across multiple countries have been able to make payments in as little as seconds.
“SWIFT gpi has meant HSBCnet customers can track the progress of their cross-border payments – and it’s also helping us speed up response times to customer queries.”
Further enhancements
Further momentum is expected to gather behind the service when SWIFT rolls out some planned enhancements and integration abilities. Additional functionalities are designed to complement the core gpi service.
One example of this is an integrated and interactive API-based service facilitating real-time dynamic bank-to-bank interaction to improve the predictability and efficiency of international payments will soon be complemented by a post-payment investigation and reconciliation service.
Additionally, SWIFT is to launch a gateway to enable e-commerce and trading platforms to directly plug into SWIFT gpi. The gateway will seamlessly connect multiple trade platforms to gpi members, thereby enabling gpi payment initiation, end-to-end payment tracking, payer authentication and credit confirmation directly from a multitude of platforms.
gpi payments can be tracked today through nearly 100 domestic systems, extending many of the benefits of gpi beyond SWIFT’s extensive reach. Building on this, SWIFT has successfully trialled the link-up of SWIFT gpi, via gpi members, to domestic real-time payments systems, in what will soon enable a new SWIFT gpi instant cross-border payments service.
Gottfried Leibbrandt, SWIFT CEO, said: “Having now passed the all-important tipping point with more than fifty per cent of cross-border payments going via gpi, we can now move quickly to realise our ambition of ensuring ubiquitous real-time – even instant – cross-border payments right around the world. By incorporating APIs, trialling distributed ledger technology and exploring new technologies such as predictive analytics, we will continue to deliver new functionalities and applications at pace – ensuring that the cross-border payments experience rapidly becomes as seamless as domestic payments.”