Wim Raymaekers, who heads up SWIFT’s global payments innovation initiative, says he is impressed by banks’ response and action in plans to overhaul the cross border payments landscape in corporate payments.

At first, SWIFT had 45 international banks on board its new innovation project, gpii (global payments innovation initiative), and earlier in April, SWIFT announced 21 banks were signed up for the pilot.

At this stage in the game, there are "52 or 53" banks involved in working together to create and agree new business rules so as to make corporate payments more streamlined and transparent.

The initiative, which began with discussions with just a few banks last year and is in line with SWIFT’s 2020 strategy to rejuvenate corporate banking, consists of four objectives:

  1. To make payments faster- same day
  2. To make transparent charges and fees
  3. To create real time tracking of payments
  4. To develop rich remittance information. Corporates pay on invoice. You need to know which invoice it is you’re paying.

The banks have committed to the pilot to run through to December 2016, and to share initial results at the Sibos event in September 2016.

EPI caught up with global head of banking markets and project lead for the gpii, Wim Raymaekers, at SWIFT’s annual Business Forum London.

How well do you really know your competitors?

Access the most comprehensive Company Profiles on the market, powered by GlobalData. Save hours of research. Gain competitive edge.

Company Profile – free sample

Thank you!

Your download email will arrive shortly

Not ready to buy yet? Download a free sample

We are confident about the unique quality of our Company Profiles. However, we want you to make the most beneficial decision for your business, so we offer a free sample that you can download by submitting the below form

By GlobalData
Visit our Privacy Policy for more information about our services, how we may use, process and share your personal data, including information of your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. Our services are intended for corporate subscribers and you warrant that the email address submitted is your corporate email address.

Raymaekers was impressed with the commitment shown.

"The initial focus is the corporates. But the way we achieve these things is by multi-lateral service agreements between banks so retail customers could also use this. You could go and ask your bank to put a payment through gpii," Raymaekers said.

SWIFT has been talking about exploring the potential benefits of distributed ledger technology and implementing different technologies for different parts of the system. But the starting point is the existing rails.

"We can make a difference today if we build on those. Building and developing new technology will take 3-5 years and we would still not have made any difference," Raymaekers explained.

The new technology will come into play with the building of the payment tracker, which is a mutualised investment stored in the cloud.

Further to this, the implementation of new technologies will be applied to modernising nostro-vostro accounts, which are all distributed databases.

"So blockchain, for example, could be an interesting technology to improve the reconciliation between those databases," said Raymaekers.

"We will see if new technologies will bring benefits in terms of reducing the costs or enabling new services to be provided. It is very much data and tech driven alongside updating business rules to improve how banks act with each other."

"The banks involved represent about 70% total cross border payments business in SWIFT so very representative. The business is quite concentrated," Raymaeker said.