Swift has launched an Industry Challenge to find two winning fintechs who will be granted €100,000 to further develop new overlay services that leverage its Swift global payments innovation (gpi) platform.
The cooperative says it is particularly interested in finding partners to use the platform to solve incremental challenges faced by corporate treasurers. These services can include, for example, enhanced invoice presentment and reconciliation to facilitate financial supply chains, exchange of supply chain documentation to improve global trade, exchange and interactive enquiry of account and processing conditions to improve end-to-end straight through processing, and providing additional party and transaction information to support compliance and sanctions screening of cross-border payments.
Wim Raymaekers, Head of Banking Market and SWIFT gpi Programme Manager at SWIFT said: “Rather than develop solutions in silo, companies - banks and SWIFT included, should open APIs to an ecosystem of partners. There are many companies out there with good ideas. SWIFT gpi is a great innovation in itself; with this industry challenge we want to foster additional collaborative innovation, drawing the best talents and thinking to our table.”
Five fintech companies will be invited to a gpi Industry Challenge workshop in Singapore on 13-14 September 2017, where they will receive coaching from fintech experts and be in direct contact with 30 gpi member banks. Two winners will be selected and receive up to 100,000 euro each to further develop their concept over a three month period with banks and SWIFT, getting exposure to the financial industry, and be presented at Sibos in Toronto in October 2017.
Swift's gpi platform was launched in January 2017 to improve the cross-border payments experience for corporate treasurers in over 85 country corridors. Key features of the gpi service include enhanced business rules and a secure tracking database in the cloud accessible via APIs, resulting in faster “same day credits” to end beneficiaries, transparency of fees, and end-to-end tracking of payments in real-time. A strategic roadmap includes the ability to immediately stop a payment and convey rich payment data. SWIFT gpi also explores new technology, running a proof of concept using distributed ledger technology to reconcile banks’ nostro accounts in real-time.
Swift's Industry Challenge programme was launched in 2016. Three start-ups were announced at Sibos in Geneva as winners of the first challenge to introduce blockchain to the securities sector: SmartContract, Rise and Coin Sciences.