SWIFT announces today that JSC. Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV) signed up for its global payments innovation initiative, SWIFT gpi, confirming its digital banking strategy.
Since 2009, BIDV has consistently ranked first in terms of readiness for IT implementation in the Vietnam ICT Index of the Ministry of Information and Communications of Vietnam and Vietnam Association for Information Processing (VAIP) among Vietnamese commercial banks.
The bank joins more than 120 of the world’s major transaction banks that are already committed to the largest change initiative that the world of cross border payments has seen in the last 30 years. Since the go live of SWIFT gpi in January 2017, the service has taken off very rapidly and over 5 million payments have already been exchanged between 34 banks live around the world. With SWIFT gpi, cross-border payments no longer take 2 to 3 days, in fact 50% of the payments are completed within 2 hours and one third of them are completed in less than 30 minutes. Future releases of SWIFT gpi will include the ability to stop and recall payments and SWIFT is also engaging the global FinTech community to build additional services over SWIFT gpi. In parallel, the initiative is also exploring the use of distributed ledger technology. With SWIFT gpi, banks in Vietnam are able to offer their clients an enhanced cross-border payments experience in the emerging and rapidly growing market of Vietnam.
Tran Phuong, Senior Executive Vice President, BIDV said: “SWIFT gpi is the answer to the growing needs of our corporate customers as it removes the friction that used to exist in correspondent banking. We trust SWIFT gpi is the new norm for cross-border payments and we look forward to providing our clients with the best services available to support their evolving needs”.
Sharon Toh, Head of ASEAN Region, SWIFT said: “By joining SWIFT gpi and with strong ambitions in banking digitalisation, BIDV confirms their commitment to offer the best services to their clients. As Vietnamese corporates are increasingly working at an international level, the speed of settlement, certainty, transparency and traceability are critical and we trust SWIFT gpi will strongly support their ambitions”