What is SWIFT gpi?
A better payment messaging solution for payers, recipients and financial institutions.
What is SWIFT?
SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. SWIFT is a secure payment messaging network that facilitates international payments between over 10,000 financial institutions.
If you’ve ever made an international payment it was likely through the SWIFT network. SWIFT processes over 15,000,000 payment messages every month.
While SWIFT is the primary method of making international payments, they still suffer from several issues that needed to be resolved to keep up with expectations. These included a lack of visibility over funds once they'd been sent, high routing fees being charged by intermediaries (which meant less money was arriving with the recipient that was sent) and payments being delayed.
To solve these problems, SWIFT has launched a new initiative, SWIFT gpi.
What is SWIFT gpi?
SWIFT gpi (gpi stands for Global Payments Innovation) is a new initiative from SWIFT and was developed to improve the experience of making a payment via the SWIFT network for both customers and banks.
SWIFT gpi combines the traditional SWIFT messaging and banking system with a new set of rules. Any bank that joins gpi has to follow these rules, which include transparency of fees, end-to-end payment tracking, and confirmation of credit to the recipient's account.
This improves upon the old standards to meet greater demands for pricing, speed, and transparency of international payments. The initial launch of SWIFT gpi was in 2017 but there are already over 3,700 banks who are members, processing over $300bn a day.
“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, SWIFT
What are the benefits of SWIFT gpi?
SWIFT outlines four key goals of the new gpi network:
To increase payment speed
Improvements in communication and higher standards for banks means that payments will be quicker when made through the SWIFT gpi network
To provide end-to-end tracking
All payments have a Unique End-to-End Transaction Reference (UETR) which can be used to check the location of the funds at any point in their journey, in real-time.
To improve transparency of fees and charges
Banks who are part of the gpi network are required to provide full visibility on processing fees and times, which will enable individuals to make better decisions and allow banks to improve routing.
To maintain consistent data records
Gpi guarantees that all remittance data that is sent with payments will be unaltered throughout the whole payments journey. This allows recipients to easily reconcile payments against invoices or orders.