Swift Intros Rules to Speed Cross-Border Retail Payments

Swift is introducing rules to speed cross-border payments for consumers and small businesses.

The rules, created in partnership with more than 30 banks, enable retail customers to have peace of mind when making international payments, the financial messaging network said in a Thursday (Sept. 25) news release.

“Recent upgrades have significantly improved the experience, enabling fully transparent transfers that exceed G20 targets, with 75% of payments reaching beneficiary banks within 10 minutes,” the release said.

Initiatives such as Swift Go and experience benchmarking have already benefited consumer channels, and this new framework will further extend the advantages to 4 billion accounts in more than 200 countries, according to the release.

“Swift has worked with its community over the past few years to significantly raise the bar on the cross-border payments experience,” Swift Chief Business Officer Thierry Chilosi said in the release. “And now, together with the industry, we are bringing those same benefits to retail customers around the world. The new scheme will ensure that consumers and small businesses will experience fast and predictable international payments, whether sending money to family abroad or paying an overseas supplier.”

Banks involved in the program include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Santander, Lloyds Bank, Deutsche Bank and others.

Meanwhile, the consumerization of cross-border payments is transforming corporate treasuries.

“As businesses globalize, the idea of payments halting for weekends or holidays looks increasingly anachronistic,” PYMNTS reported Monday (Sept. 22). “Treasury platforms now integrate with wallet infrastructures that maintain balances in multiple currencies and release funds instantly, bypassing traditional cut-off windows.”

Treasurers can now optimize for cost, speed or transparency, depending on the transaction type. Supplier payments might benefit from low-cost local rails, while high-value transfers may still use Swift to ensure regulatory compliance, the report said.

This portfolio approach, inspired by consumer FinTech, marks a shift from the one-size-fits-all system that was a defining feature of cross-border payments for decades.

“One thing that all treasury organizations are looking for is visibility into their global activity,” Sebastian Sintes, director of transactional FX at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in an interview posted Sept. 8.

“For the corporate organizations that have been making some heavy investments into their system infrastructure, that return on that investment is going to start to be felt in the upcoming years…,” he added.