SWIFT Says More Than $40 Trillion Transferred Over gpi

SWIFT announced Thursday (February 28) that more than $40 trillion has been transferred over its gpi service last year.

In a press release, SWIFT said its rapid adoption resulted in the share of cross-border messages using gpi having jumped to 56 percent at the end of last year compared to 15 percent at the beginning of the year. It marks a year-over-year increase of 270 percent, SWIFT said in the press release. According to SWIFT, more than 3,500 banks, accounting for 85 percent of the total payment traffic, have committed to adopting gpi.  SWIFT noted that gpi already carried more than $300 billion a day in 148 currencies across more than 1,100 country corridors. On average 40 percent of SWIFT gpi payments are credited to beneficiaries in five minutes, while half are credited within thirty minutes and three quarters within six hours. Nearly all are completed within 24 hours.

“Having now passed the all-important tipping point with more than fifty percent of cross-border payments going via gpi, we can now move quickly to realize our ambition of ensuring ubiquitous real-time – even instant – cross-border payments right around the world,” said Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO of SWIFT, in the press release. “By incorporating APIs, trialing distributed ledger technology and exploring new technologies such as predictive analytics, we will continue to deliver new functionalities and applications at pace – ensuring that the cross-border payments experience rapidly becomes as seamless as domestic payments.”

SWIFT said it is working to quickly to complement its gpi service with additional functionality and to integrate it across a range of applications. It pointed to the launch of an integrated and interactive API service for facilitating real-time interaction between banks to improve the predictability and efficiency of international payments. That will soon have a post-payment investigation and conciliation service.

“SWIFT gpi delivered on the promise of greater payment transparency and predictability, highlighting how banks and industry collaboration can quickly deliver innovation,” said Emma Loftus, head of global payments for J.P. Morgan’s Treasury Services. “For years, clients have asked their banks for end-to-end transparency which is easy to use, understand, and implement. With 76% of our payments now being executed via gpi, we are experiencing direct benefits in our ability to respond to client inquiries. Processes that have taken days are being now completed within seconds.”