Pelican today announced its support for SWIFT as it develops a new service for low value cross-border payments. This new service will enable banks to provide fast, easy, predictable, and frictionless cross-border payments for consumers and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The service is expected to be ready by end of March 2021.

The new service builds on the strength of SWIFT gpi and the high-speed rails that have already transformed high-value payments, and will enable consumers and SMEs to send predictable low value international payments seamlessly via their financial institutions. Costs and processing times will be known upfront, and real-time status will be available to both originator and beneficiary banks.

Pelican is enabling SWIFT low value payments (SLVP) through SWIFT gpi using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Pelican performs smart validation and intelligent payment data enrichment to boost straight-through processing at both sending and receiving banks and to facilitate processing within a prescribed service level agreement. Payment data enrichment ensures that the correct BIC Code, IBAN validation and enrichment, and other bank codes, are provided so that there is no human intervention required. This facilitates fully automated end-to-end straight through processing and enables timely execution of international payments.

Pelican’s plug-in solution can be deployed as a part of Pelican payment processing or as a stand-alone solution with other payment systems. Pelican allows banks to access its solution on the cloud or deploy on their premises, based on the bank’s existing payment architecture. This minimizes disruption and time to market deployment. Banks using PelicanPayments will be better able to compete against global remittance providers and card networks for low-value transfers in key currency corridors with the addition of SWIFT’s new account-to-account service for consumers and SMEs.

Parth Desai, CEO of Pelican, said: “Payment systems are undergoing significant innovation and change, as new technology developments and regulation impacts banks, as well as the expectations of their corporate and retail customers. The success of SWIFT gpi, which is used by thousands of banks and carries billions of payments worldwide, will allow efficient transaction processing and full transparency. This provides an opportunity to transform the experience in the SME and consumer payment markets. With our intelligent solutions aimed at SME and corporate markets, Pelican is confident that the initiative for low-value cross-border payments will have a similar large scale adoption and help us make international payments simple, transparent and fast, with guaranteed timely delivery.”

SWIFT announced plans for the low-value payments solution in the run up to Sibos 2020 as part of its ongoing innovation to make cross-border payments as easy, predictable and transparent as domestic payments are today.

Carlo Palmers, Head of Payments Solutions at SWIFT, said: “SWIFT gpi has already transformed high-value cross-border payments and its success has provided us with an opportunity to bring its many benefits to the SME and consumer payment markets. Working alongside more than 20 financial institutions and vendors, we will enable these customers to make fast, easy, predictable and competitively priced payments all around the world via their banks.”

As a trusted partner of SWIFT for more than 20 years, Pelican is delighted to be part of the SWIFT ecosystem, providing innovative solutions to intelligently enrich and route payments with a quick time to market solution.