Swift Offers Quick Payments In Multiple Currencies

Swift and a group of foreign banks have finished the first real-world test of instant payments between different currency zones.

Iberpay and major Spanish banks like BBVA, Santander, and CaixaBank tested this new service for the first time in Europe. This was done before the new One-Leg-Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) scheme of the European Payment Council (EPC) goes into effect on November 28.

During the service’s pilot phase, dozens of real payments sent through the Swift GPI Instant service from banks in other currency areas (National Australia Bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Ita Unibanco in Brazil, and Lloyds Banking Group in the UK) were processed, settled, and credited to the account of the final customer in a matter of seconds.

As a world first, this pilot project included the integration of the Spanish payment processor Iberpay’s real-time, 24/7 instant transfer platform with Swift’s GPI tracker. This gave end-to-end visibility of payment progress and made transactions more clear.

BBVA states: “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.”