SWIFT today announces a major milestone in the take-up of gpi with more than $40trn transferred over the service in 2018. Rapid adoption saw the share of cross-border messages using gpi soar from 15% at the start of 2018, to 56% by the end of the year, a year-on-year increase of 270%. More than 3,500 banks, accounting for 85% of SWIFT’s total payments traffic, have committed to adopting gpi, evidencing how the service has achieved the near total transformation of the cross-border payments landscape just two years since launch.

Emma Loftus, head of global payments for J.P. Morgan’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.”

SWIFT gpi is already carrying over $300bn a day in 148 currencies across more than 1,100 country corridors and 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; and almost 100% within 24 hours.

Thomas W. Halpin, Global Head of Payments Product Management, HSBC, said: “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.”

Building on its success, SWIFT is moving rapidly to complement the core gpi service with a raft of additional functionalities and to integrate gpi into a diverse range of applications. For instance, the rollout of 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. 

In tandem, 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.

With thousands of banks using the service and gpi accounting for 99% of all traffic on some major country corridors – such as US-China, SWIFT gpi is without question the de facto standard in the new era of fast, secure and efficient cross-border payments. Already integrated into most major domestic high-value payment systems around the world, 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.”