SWIFT, the secure financial information service, has published the results of its global cross-border instant payment trial, which showed the fastest payment took just 13 seconds.
Payment experiments with SWIFT gpi instant, a cross-border payment service, and Fast and Secure transfer (Fast), a domestic instant payment service in Singapore, showed that a payment from Australia to Singapore via Fast was rated as the fastest payment in the experiment.
Participants in the trial included 17 Banks from seven countries - Australia, China, Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore and Thailand. According to the records, all end-to-end payments were processed in less than 25 seconds, with the fastest recorded payments from Asia to Singapore in just 14 seconds, Europe in 15 seconds and North America in 20 seconds.
SWIFT added that six national corridors to Singapore were involved, with the maximum time difference between Canada and Singapore being 12 hours.
SWIFT says its instant gpi payments reuse existing cross-border and domestic payment infrastructure, while eliminating the common delays caused by customs clearing within countries.
Banks participating in the global trial include ANZ, CBA, Westpac, HSBC, Bank of China and Royal Bank of Canada.
Eddie Haddad, managing director for Asia Pacific at SWIFT, says:
"We are systematically connecting the domestic instant payment systems on the gpi platform through existing network systems. Singapore's track record in payment innovation makes it a suitable launch platform for gpi Instant."
"The successful testing of the thai-singapore corridor also confirms the scalability of gpi instant to pan-asean cross-border instant payment services, which are critical for integration across the region. This attempt is a recognition of SWIFT's vision to ensure that cross-border payments become as seamless and convenient as domestic payments and reflects the global scalability of gpi for ubiquitous cross-border instant payments."
The global trial comes after SWIFT tested its instant gpi payment service using Australia's new payment platform. On the platform, payments from China to Australia can be made in 18 seconds.
ANZ bank, CBA and National Australia bank are among the Banks participating in the 2018 pilot. Other participating Banks are from China, Singapore and Thailand.
SWIFT said it plans more tests of gpi Instant in other markets, including Europe's TARGET Instant Payments Settlement system, ahead of its planned global launch later this year.
Earlier this year, SWIFT also announced a proof-of-concept test of its gpi Link gateway, which connects e-commerce and transaction platforms to SWIFT gpi, using R3's Corda distributed ledger technology (DLT).
SWIFT said at the time that it planned to expand the pilot to support other DLT, non-dlt and e-commerce trading platforms.
In a white paper released last month, the financial networking company outlined its vision for cross-border payments and its goal of making them as seamless and convenient as domestic payments.
In the title is "pay: looking to the future, instant access, ubiquitous (SWIFT - engineering revolution) in a white paper, SWIFT said for Banks to promote the close relation of the single currency beyond the value of the exchange, in essence is more complex, they hope their standard adopted by the world, to help all relevant parties.
"Importantly, we do not believe that the challenge of cross-border payments should be solved with a closed loop system. This makes it easy to resolve a subset or subsets of participants, but the value needs to be transferred from account to account, "SWIFT writes.
"Ring systems create obstacles and friction; They reduce substitutability and portability, limit competition and disperse liquidity."