Swift and Iberpay pilot instant payments across currency zones
By Gloria Methri
Iberpay, Swift, BBVA, and several international banks have successfully completed the first pilot to process instant payments between different currency areas. The ultimate goal is to improve these international payments involving currency exchange in terms of speed, transparency, cost, availability, and accessibility.
Iberpay and leading Spanish banks such as BBVA, Santander, and CaixaBank carried out the first test of this service in Europe, with official entry coming into force on November 28th. The objective is to improve these international payments, in line with the guidelines of several global bodies such as the G7, G20, Financial Stability Board (FSB), Basel Bank for International Settlements (BIS), European Commission, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.
During this pilot phase of the service, dozens of actual payments originating from banks in other currency areas (National Australia Bank, Australia, and New Zealand Banking Group, Itaú Unibanco in Brazil, and Lloyds Banking Group in the UK) and sent through the Swift GPI Instant service have been processed, settled, and credited in a matter of seconds to the ultimate beneficiary customer’s account, thanks to the final delivery of the payment through Iberpay’s instant transfer service.
This pilot initiative included, as a world first, the integration of Iberpay’s instant transfer platform, which operates 24/7 in real-time, with Swift’s GPI tracker, providing end-to-end visibility of payment status and greater transaction transparency.
Some of the main advantages of this initiative include the possibility of processing international payments 24/7 within seconds and end-to-end payment traceability. All of this allows us to improve the customer’s user experience, offer new use cases, and develop innovative services that compete with new players in this payment sector.
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