Singapore bank DBS is introducing the ability for small businesses and larger corporates to track their cross-border payments in real time.
Reports in Singapore Business on Friday (April 20) said the financial institution’s real-time tracking service is now live for more than 200,000 of its business clients in Singapore and Hong Kong. The bank is using SWIFT’s gpi service, and is also reportedly in discussions with the payments messaging company to join a consortium to develop a real-time payments solution for cross-border transactions in the Asia Pacific region.
DBS said it also plans to roll out the tracking service to its business customers in China, India, Indonesia and Taiwan in the coming months. Businesses participating in the transaction must be serviced by banks that are part of SWIFT gpi.
“Corporate cross-border payment volumes have increased by 25 percent in the last 12 months,” said Navinder Duggal, DBS head of cash product management. “Today, one in four of all cross-border transactions are received by their beneficiaries in less than two hours, and we expect these volumes to rise.”
He added that the DBS SWIFT gpi service “gives companies online visibility when tracking payments across more than 48 gpi banks across the globe, and this is set to increase as more banks come on board.”
Businesses can log in to DBS IDEAL, its online business banking platform, to gain visibility into the status of cross-border payments, including whether they have been received and the location of the funds as they travel across borders.
DBS already enables real-time payments for business customers who are sending funds to another business within the DBS network via its PriorityPay service. According to the bank, the value of payments sent using PriorityPay has increased by 60 percent year-over-year.
Earlier this year, SWIFT gpi rolled out the Tracker solution to enable banks and their customers to track payments across borders in real time. SWIFT also noted that it plans to add an extension to the gpi Tracker later this year to include end-to-end transaction reference for all payment instructions across more than 200 countries.