Swift Inks Deal With Federal Reserve Banks, The Clearing House For Swift gpi

Swift, the payment processing company, announced Monday (March 13) it has reached a deal with the Federal Reserve Banks and the Clearing House in order to support end-to-end payments tracking.

According to a report, the announcement Monday puts Swift closer to realizing its main goals of supporting payment tracking across different wire services. Swift global payment innovation (gpi), which was launched last month, is made up a range of service-level agreements to improve the experience in correspondent banking by making it speedier, more transparent and predictable for cross-border payments. Swift currently has 12 major transaction banks using the service and expects more participants during the next few months. The report noted that in order for the feature to have a real impact, the gpi service has to extend beyond its own network by tracking payments as they move in and out of private market infrastructures. What’s more, the report said member banks need a standardized, local market practice for the payments to be exchanged in a local clearing system that doesn’t use Swift.

With the two deals Swift said it is now going after the Bank of Japan Financial Network System and SIX’s Swiss Interbank Clearing to make them gpi-compatible, noted the report.

“Support from the market infrastructure community is a key factor for success,” said Stephen Grainger, head of North America at Swift in the report. “Taking a standardized approach to identifying transactions for SWIFT gpi in these local clearing systems will reduce fragmentation and costs for banks. We look forward to working more closely with these and other market infrastructures as the industry realizes its goal for faster, more transparent and traceable cross-border payments.”