Visa and Swift team up to enhance global B2B payments

By Delisha Fernandes

Visa and Swift has announced a collaboration to streamline international business-to-business (B2B) payments by strengthening connectivity between their networks.

This partnership aims to provide financial institutions and their customers with more choice when sending money across borders, while improving the end-to-end speed and transparency of their transactions.

Chris Newkirk, Global Head of Commercial & Money Movement Solutions at Visa said, “Many businesses continue to face complexities while making cross-border payments that hurt their bottom lines. By working with Swift, Visa will help enhance our financial institution clients’ offerings to their corporate customers. The collaboration will help provide clarity and enhanced data, while removing errors before, during and after the payment.”

With this collaboration, Visa will deploy capabilities developed by Swift that can help increase the speed and certainty of cross-border money movement. This includes Swift Payment Pre-validation to enable upfront checks of Visa B2B Connect payments, reducing unnecessary delays. Additionally, the networks plan to work together to increase end-to-end transaction visibility by using high-speed Swift GPI capabilities and tracking data.

To facilitate this collaboration, Visa will migrate its connection to Swift through Alliance Cloud, a scalable, secure cloud-based channel for connecting to Swift’s network, as well as messaging services, standards and solutions. Through this partnership, financial institutions on both networks will have more routing options for their business customers, with real-time status and updates.

Thierry Chilosi, Chief Strategy Officer at Swift said, “Expectations for international payments are rising as the complexity of moving money across borders is intensifying. Our work with Visa helps address both challenges, providing new connectivity and capabilities in the backend to drive exciting innovation in front-end customer channels. It’s part of our strategic focus on payment optionality, enabling value in all forms to move seamlessly around the world with strong peace of mind on security and trust and, through collaborations like this, consistently elevating the customer experience.”