As banks face growing challenges due to evolving payment systems and the global shift to real-time payments, SWIFT is providing the Hong Kong financial community with an enterprise messaging and gateway solution to the Hong Kong Faster Payments System (FPS) that aims to go live in September 2018.
Several global and local banks in Hong Kong participating in FPS already rely on SWIFT for their domestic and cross-border payments.
SWIFT’s solution for the Hong Kong market will provide banks with the opportunity to leverage a single platform, Alliance Messaging Hub (AMH) to connect to FPS using ISO 20022-based financial messages. AMH is an orchestration layer that includes a gateway to FPS, as well as other gateways and APIs, allowing financial institutions to connect to other non-SWIFT networks. The solution is available with both real-time and batch processing capabilities, supporting the low latency and integration requirements of all financial institutions.
SWIFT is committed to the Hong Kong banking community, already connecting over 200 banks to the territory’s four RTGS systems and recently supporting ISO 20022 messaging standards finalisation for FPS. As a member-owned cooperative, SWIFT chose a community approach when building a FPS-ready solution that can be implemented with minimal disruption to the bank’s legacy technology and business processes, whilst keeping costs down.
Michael Moon, Head of Payments, APAC, SWIFT said: “Globally, SWIFT supports over 100 payment systems and thousands of financial institutions safely, securely and reliably process payments using SWIFT. Our customers experience complexity when connecting to different payment systems and value the standardisation and re-use of services that SWIFT provides. Additionally, next generation payment systems are faster, information rich and available on a 24-7 basis. Together with deep payment messaging standards expertise and re-use of existing SWIFT interface services we’re able to reduce the cost of change for our customers and help them rapidly introduce these next-generation payment services, such as the FPS in Hong Kong.”
Earlier this year, SWIFT announced it would provide a solution to connect to The Clearing House’s real-time payments platform in the U.S. and to TARGET’s Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) in Europe. In Asia Pacific, SWIFT was selected in 2015 to build the basic infrastructure of Australia’s new payments platform (NPP) that is expected to go live early 2018.