Swift enhances cross border dominance with Visa and Wise deals

You may all be aware that Sibos is on this week! Earlier in the week we covered an interesting development that Revolut is attacking Swifts dominance in cross border payments with its RevTag offering.

Swift enhances cross border dominance

Now, Swift has hit back with a series of new partnerships of its own in a bid to secure its place as Top Boy in the cross border payments space.

Visa and Swift: announced a collaboration to streamline international business-to-business (B2B) payments by strengthening connectivity between their networks that move trillions in value globally. Working together, the organizations aim to provide financial institutions and their customers with more choice when sending money across borders, while improving the end-to-end speed and transparency of their transactions.

As part of the joint effort, Visa will deploy capabilities developed by Swift that can help increase the speed and certainty of cross-border money movement. This includes Swift Payment Pre-validation to enable upfront checks of Visa B2B Connect payments, reducing unnecessary delays by catching potential errors before the payment is initiated.

Additionally, the networks plan to work together to increase end-to-end transaction visibility by using high-speed Swift GPI capabilities and tracking data.

Visa will migrate its connection to Swift through Alliance Cloud, a scalable, secure cloud-based channel for connecting to Swift’s network, as well as messaging services, standards and solutions.

Through this collaboration, financial institutions on both networks will have more routing options for their business customers, with real-time status and updates.

Swift and Wise: also announced a partnership. This plan will provide financial institutions and their customers with more cross-border payment options, allowing payments sent through Swift to be completed securely and seamlessly through Wise, with end-to-end transparency.

Financial institutions looking for innovative services can now use Wise’s latest Correspondent Services to send Swift payment messages directly to the Wise Platform, Wise’s infrastructure solution for banks and key enterprises. Customers can thus enjoy both Wise’s fast and convenient services and Swift’s broad coverage without making any major changes to the system.

Wise Platform will leverage Swift’s advanced capabilities to enhance its services, such as cloud and API connectivity, pre-validated payment services, and allow banks to continue to enjoy all the signature features of Swift GPI, including tracking payment status. The Wise platform will update payment status from time to time, ensuring end-to-end visibility of both networks.

What is most interesting from the Wise/Swift agreement was what the Wise CEO said in an on-stage interview where he suggested that the partnership may be the end of the Wise app.

“Today we have tens of millions of people downloading our app and onboarding, going to all the faff of managing their bank and Wise,” said Kristo Käärmann, CEO, Wise.

“Maybe what this collaboration helps us to do is…you can get the same experience from the bank and you don’t have to use our app. That would be my objective from this collaboration.”