• SWIFT gpi Instant capitalises on the 24/7 availability of instant payment systems such as FAST to enable payment settlement in the destination market
• Banks connect with multiple networks
• SWIFT and SCB are looking into distributed ledger technology (DLT) as a solution for payments

Be it in their personal or work lives, consumers expect instant information, messages and commerce. A person who has instant services in his/her personal life will go to work running treasury or corporate payments and expect the same speed for larger value transactions.

“You’re used to instant in your life – services, purchases off the net,” said Shirish Wadivkar, the Standard Chartered Bank’s (SCB) global head of transaction banking products. He stated, however, that there has been a blurring of boundaries.

Banks are having difficulties in moving at the same pace. “When it comes to the speed of money,” Wadivkar noted that “things slow down. The speed of money is 9 to 5.”

To solve this problem and provide faster payments, traceability and lower costs, solutions such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication’s (SWIFT) global payments innovation (gpi) was launched in 2017.

  While it might appear that transactions still take a long time, noted Edward Haddad, Asia Pacific managing director for SWIFT, the reality is that gpi can send messages to the other side of the planet in two to three seconds.

SWIFT data shows that 40% of gpi payments reach beneficiaries within 5 minutes, 50% in less than 30 minutes and 90% within 24 hours. The perception that payments take longer, Haddad explained, is due to frictions such as regulatory requirements, batch processing, foreign exchange rates and documentation.

Seeing the benefits of gpi, banks have adopted it quickly and 70% of payments on SWIFT now use this new solution. Haddad added that banks are using gpi even thou...

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