Financial institutions will now be able to route Swift payments messages directly to Wise through the latter’s correspondent services solution. Swift, which stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, connects more than 11,500 banking and securities organisations, market infrastructures and corporate customers in more than 200 countries and territories. Wise is a UK-based fintech payments platform that provides financial infrastructure for over 60 partners around the globe.
In a joint release dated Sept 19, both Wise and Swift note that this collaboration will help financial institutions provide a greater range of choice to their customers for cross-border payments. The Wise platform will use Swift’s capabilities to power its service, including its cloud and application programming interface (API) connectivity and payment pre-validation, and other hallmark features of Swift global payments innovation.
This will enable customers to benefit from the speed and convenience of Wise, and the breadth of Swift without needing to implement any major changes to their systems, says the release.
The collaboration was announced in Toronto at the annual Sibos conference, a global financial services networking event organised by Swift. The release notes that this is “the start of a broader relationship”, and comes as increased innovation and fragmentation in the financial ecosystem is creating more ways for money to move.
Steve Naudé, managing director of Wise platform, says: "We know that banks face a number of challenges when it comes to enhancing their international payments, including that this often requires them to embed technology which is incompatible with legacy infrastructure. By simultaneously leveraging existing payments architecture and optimising payouts using Wise's global network, we are empowering banks to innovate effortlessly. Our network, combined with Swift’s extensive reach and trackability, will make international payments more convenient, faster and lower cost for banks, without necessitating a major tech build.”
"Our collaboration with Wise illustrates how Swift can be the bedrock from which the whole industry can innovate to improve cross-border payments and enhance the options available for customers across the globe,” says Thierry Chilosi, chief strategy officer at Swift. “Cooperation such as this will be vital in our collective efforts to achieve the G20 targets for cross-border payments and enable the seamless, efficient and secure movement of value around a fragmented world."
