Peru Taps Vocalink In Payments System Overhaul

Amid the continuing movements by governments and nations to overhaul payments operations, Vocalink said Wednesday (Dec. 12) that it has secured a contract with Cámara de Compensación Electrónica (CCE), the automated clearing house in Peru, to help transform payments infrastructure in that country. The initiative will focus on creating an architecture that will eventually allow for the real-time processing of electronic payments.

Vocalink said that it will bring its Immediate Payments solution to the architecture, which in turn will help process credit transfers in real time – and, as the company said in a release, will enable users to send and receive payments from their mobile phones through the use of phone numbers alone.

“The partnership is Vocalink’s first fully managed service in Latin America, which will ensure that we continue to provide our payments expertise long after we have implemented the new infrastructure,” said Vocalink CEO Paul Stoddart in the release. “We are committed to developing further partnerships around the world to build global, ubiquitous, real-time payments.”

Vocalink has been involved in other faster payments deployments done on a national scale. As reported previously, the company has been part of a raft of initiatives that includes the implementation of faster payments in the U.K. Vocalink also has been involved in the launch of The Clearing House’s RTP in the U.S., the release noted, and the real-time mobile transfer systems in Singapore and Thailand.

Separately, a number of retailers, among them giants Target and Walmart, have requested that the Federal Reserve create a real-time interbank settlement system. That would be a way to reduce the gap of time that exists after a debit card is used to pay for a transaction and when funds make their way to retailers.

The Fed, of course, has been eyeing the creation of a faster payments system, and yet there may be some challenges afoot, noted The Wall Street Journal. For one thing, consumers are partial to paying with credit cards that offer rewards, and may be hesitant to adopt other payment methods. There also remains the fact that merchants and other businesses have already invested in hardware amid the transition to chip cards.

Separately, SWIFT said this past week that it has launched a pilot program that focuses on an integrated gpi payments service that quickly identifies and eliminates payment message errors. SWIFT has said it is working with 14 banks globally. The service will use a real-time, API-based offering that will let banks send and receive APIs across the SWIFT network in order to check beneficiary account information and locate errors. The pilot is tied to a more broad-reaching gpi pre-validation program. The broader initiative will use AI (among other technologies) to boost predictability of international payments.

“SWIFT gpi has already created a fast and frictionless cross-border payment experience for many banks and corporates – but we know there are still payments that can be sped up further by ensuring the correct information is provided at the start,” said Luc Meurant, chief marketing officer of SWIFT, in a press release. “By embedding this new capability in the same payment messaging channel, thousands of banks will benefit from the resulting efficiencies, thus boosting the financial services industry as a whole as we move toward universal implementation of gpi in 2020.”

Industry specs are slated to be finalized for the pre-validation service by the end of 2018, and the pilot is slated to start early next year.