Euro, Dollar Clearing Agencies Prep for Real-Time Transatlantic Payments

The Clearing House (TCH), EBA CLEARING and SWIFT are on track to begin piloting their transatlantic instant payment system known as Immediate Cross-Border Payments (IXB), the three organizations stated today (Oct. 6) in a joint press release.

First announced in April this year, the IXB pilot will leverage the existing real-time payment systems RTP® in the United States, run by TCH, and RT1 in Europe, run by EBA CLEARING.

The new cross-border scheme will begin processing the first live transactions in the euro-dollar currency corridor “in the coming months,” the release stated.

With the support of 25 financial institutions from both sides of the Atlantic, the three involved clearing agencies have been testing and developing IXB for the past six months. The service will connect existing infrastructure to enable synchronized settlement of RTP and RT1 payments.

Commenting in today’s press release, Petra Plompen, Head of New Initiatives at EBA CLEARING, said: “We are very pleased that the delivery of the IXB pilot is fully on track and we are eager to see the service take up live operations in the coming months.”

“We look forward to the important insights and learnings we expect to gain from this pilot phase, which should help us tune the service for commercial rollout in 2023,” she added.

The IXB pilot will be followed by the launch of a full-service cross-border payment offering. The model has been designed so that it can also be be replicated across other currency corridors and payment systems. The release stated that the IXB initiative is expected to add more currencies “from an early stage.”

“The IXB pilot will help prepare for a full commercial rollout that will revolutionize the way cross-border payments are made between the United States and Europe,” said Rusiru Gunasena, Senior Vice President, RTP Product Management and Strategy, at The Clearing House.

“The connection between RTP and RT1 delivers a new way of moving money across borders safely, quickly, and at lower cost. The IXB model is also designed to add additional currency corridors in the near future,” he said in the release.

The involvement of the interbank messaging system, SWIFT, is likely to give the project an additional layer of credibility and provide the experience needed to roll out real-time cross-border payments the world over.

As PYMNTS wrote in the first in a series of articles on the most important players in the cross-border payments game, SWIFT “has been synonymous with cross-border payments since its founding in 1973,” and is helping to lay the groundwork for the future of real-time international transfers.

Read on: SWIFT Plots Real-Time Role for Next 50 Years of Cross-Border Payments

As SWIFT’s Chief Strategy Officer, David Watson, is quoted in the IBX press release: “SWIFT is committed to ensuring instant, frictionless and interoperable transactions around the world […] we are working on many fronts to achieve this, and bringing common standards to the linking of market infrastructure projects is a fundamental pillar of our strategy.”

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