SWIFT has announced a new initiative seeking to improve the customer experience in correspondent banking by increasing the speed, transparency and predictability of cross-border payments.
The pilot of the new initiative will start from early 2016.
Designed in collaboration with the industry, the initiative will initially focus on a business-to-business payments service supported by participating banks in early 2016.
The new service aims to help corporates grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies.
It will enable corporates to receive an enhanced payments service directly from their banks, with the following key features including same day use of funds, transparency and predictability of feeds, end-to-end payments tracking and transfer of rich payment information.
The new initiative will operate on the basis of ‘business rules’ captured in multilateral service level agreements (SLAs) between participating banks. The service is designed to address end-customer needs, without compromising banks’ abilities to meet their compliance obligations, market, credit and liquidity risk requirements.
It will operate on SWIFT’s global platform; and participation will be open to any supervised financial institution that is a member of SWIFT and adheres to its business rules.
Following the pilot focused on cross-border payments for corporates, SWIFT aims to incorporate additional innovations and deploy new technologies as part of the global payments innovation initiative.
SWIFT will work with the industry to define additional service level agreements that will cater for other client groups, further reducing the costs and frictions arising from compliance, liquidity and processing efficiency considerations involved in cross-border payments.