SWIFT Will Launch A New Payment System Taking On Fintechs And Blockchain Tech

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is in the cryptocurrency news today for its recent announcement to launch a pilot Global Payment Initiative (GPI) service which will compete with the growing threat of competing blockchain and fintech solutions provided by companies such as Ripple, JP Morgan and Transferwise.

The ambitious pilot aims to ““build the foundation of a new integrated and interactive service that will significantly improve efficiencies in the payments process and which will ultimately be made available to all 10,000 banks across the SWIFT network,” as the official statement reads.

After conducting a successful GPI test in October this year and carrying out instant cross-border payments with banks in China, Singapore, Thailand and Australia, the new system is able to trigger fast identification and elimination of errors and omissions in payment data such as missing or incorrect beneficiary information or incomplete regulatory information.

With this, SWIFT hopes that the GPI payments service will also allow fast and seamless transactions, reducing the delays and costs while improving the overall customer experience. W

The GPI of the system uses an Application Programming Interface (API) which enables banks to access each other’s data and validate recipient account information before a payment is processed.

Another excerpt from the statement reads:

“Fully integrated with GPI payments, the service will facilitate real time dynamic bank-to-bank interaction using APIs to improve the predictability and efficiency of international payments, and look at using predictive analytics. It will later be complemented with a post-payment investigation and reconciliation service that will allow for fast resolution of the remaining factors, typically arising from compliance or regulatory requirements, which can slow down the payments process.”

The pilot of the GPI is set to kick off at the beginning of 2019 with 15 selected banks including JP Morgan, Barclays, Bank of China and CitiGroup to take part in the project.