Swift completed a seven-country trial of its cross-border GPI Instant payment service resulting in the successful integration with Singapore’s domestic instant payment network FAST.
The instant payments trial was conducted with 17 banks across seven countries — Australia, China, Canada, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Singapore and Thailand — with the purpose of demonstrating the successful integration of Swift’s GPI Instant payments service with Singapore’s Fast and Secure Transfers (FAST) network. The cross-border payments were all processed from end to end within 25 seconds. The fastest transfers conducted in the trial were payments sent from Australia into Singapore’s FAST network, in only 13 seconds.
“Across the world, through GPI, banks and Instant Payment systems are using our existing rails for international payments to meet today’s need for speed, traceability and transparency,” Harry Newman, head of banking at Swift, said in a press release.
Banks involved in the trial included ANZ Banking Group, Bank of China, Bangkok Bank, Commonwealth Bank, DBS Bank, HSBC, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Kasikornbank National Australia Bank, OCBC, Siam Commercial Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Westpac and Royal Bank of Canada. The initial trial discussions began in April 2018 as Swift was exploring an expansion of the GPI service into the Asia Pacific region.
Swift has also been testing its instant payment service with seven European banks through the continent's Target Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) process. The European Central Bank is interested in making sure that its TIPS platform can advance along with other faster payments services.
The news of the Singapore trial’s completion comes on the heels of Swift’s launch of its GPI service geared for corporates that allows them to initiate and track payments across multiple banking partners from a single, centralized payments platform.
Swift created the GPI Instant payments program in 2016 with the first set of banks using it in early 2017. The results so far have been rapid adoption — by the end of 2018 the GPI service accounted for 55% of Swift’s cross-border payment volume.
