IntellectEU joins 25 participant banks and business application providers for Swift’s Proof of Value (POV) — organizations on a mission to demonstrate enhanced cross-border payments experiences through Swift API capabilities.

2020 marked a major evolution in the cross-border payment space. Under the backdrop of pandemic upheaval, the G20 determined that low-value international payments had suffered too long from high costs, low speeds, and limited access and transparency. Addressing these challenges by 2027 became part of the shared vision of the G20’s Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments.

Guided by the G20 Roadmap and rising customer expectations, Swift’s latest Proof of Value represents an opportunity for participating banks to help drive this agenda. The goal is to enable the financial community to bring clarity and confidence directly to customers at all stages of the payment journey. 

Financial institutions are, therefore, being invited to actively participate in industry transformation, enhance the payment experience they offer to customers, and position themselves alongside innovators of the financial community.

Within this context, IntellectEU joins 25 participant banks and business application providers ready to demonstrate how strong integration expertise and product capabilities can enable Swift API services in order to enhance customer payment experiences.

“IntellectEU is proud to support Swift in realizing the G20's goal of enhanced payments experiences for end customers. We’re delighted to be bringing our expertise and product capabilities to contribute to this ambitious roadmap for improved speed, cost, transparency, and accessibility in cross-border payments,” explains Hanna Zubko, Co-founder and CEO, IntellectEU Inc.

“Customers increasingly expect their cross-border payments experience to match the one they receive domestically. Swift is committed to enabling our community to provide a first-class service directly to their end-users, improving upfront transparency, certainty and speed for those sending money around the world,” explains Julien Lajeunesse, Head of Front-end Enablement at Swift — “We’re delighted to be working on a pilot with financial institutions and business application providers to integrate Swift solutions into customer-facing channels, improving the cross-border payments experience for individuals and businesses.”

What is the Scope of Swift’s Proof Of Value?

Swift is working with the financial community to demonstrate how its solutions can be extended to front-end customer channels, such as banking web portals and mobile applications. Participants of the POV are collaborating to achieve objectives in 3 key areas:

I. Customer expectations

To validate how to implement core Swift services to enhance front-end experiences.

II. Payment experience

To validate how far this initiative could improve the payment experience for customers e.g., customer satisfaction.

III. Community expectations

To identify gaps in the market,  including integration, experience, features, services, in order to inform the future Swift product roadmap.

A central objective of the POV is to demonstrate that banks can offer customers the possibility of initiating fully predictable, pre-validated, pre-filled, and trackable payments, either with no-deduct or predictable deducts. 
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In total, there are 5 end-customer outcomes to be reached as part of the Swift POV:

1. No deduct

Full principal amount is credited to end-beneficiary 

2. Full transparency

Fees, FX & Speed are transparent, visible upfront by sender

3. Peace of mind

Upfront validation of beneficiary ID, bank and domestic format

4. Simplicity

Facilitate experience with prefilled data and consistent steps

5. Traceability

Follow the status of transactions with real time tracking

The Swift API Services which will enable these capabilities include:

• Swift Go API — enabling cross-border payment experiences with no deduct
• Swift Pre-Validation APIs — ensuring beneficiary account verification and more
• SwiftRef API — allowing pre-filling of payment message fields
• Swift GPI  API — enabling tracking of status throughout the payment’s journey

What Challenges need to be overcome as part of Swift’s POV?

Today, financial institutions are faced with the challenge of competing with newly established cross-border payment e-wallets and alternative payment method providers.

These fintech players offer payments that can be performed, tracked with a few clicks, and settled instantly, with full visibility on fees in advance. Most importantly, their payments are often much cheaper than using brick-and-mortar traditional banks.

At present, the equivalent service through a bank requires users to find, provide, and typically manually type in information that they may not necessarily know, for example BIC, routing codes, and so on.

Swift’s POV will enable banks to respond to the offerings of fintechs. But to make this goal achievable, financial institutions must overcome 3 key challenges: integration, complexity, and time-to-market. 

For financial institutions, connecting all required APIs and systems is no small task. The complexity of linking and maintaining several layers of interdependent banking solutions, each with their own continual updates, and consolidating the collective data — will be demanding. 

The toll of this complexity and the labor-intensive workload will, in turn, make it difficult to bring services to customers in a timely manner. Banks need an experienced technology and integration partner to achieve the desired outcomes.

How can IntellectEU help? 

Catalyst Integration Manager

IntellectEU is working together with banks to meet these challenges head on. Empowered by a deep understanding of Swift services and integration, acquired over 17 years working alongside the global banking community — we have developed a unique product suite that will help drive our integration projects to success.

‍Catalyst Integration Manager connects financial enterprises to Swift API services with unmatched efficiency and flexibility. Predefined libraries and connectors enable financial institutions to streamline back-office integration. Simply connecting to our solution provides access to all supporting interfaces and capabilities and eliminates the pain of manual integration tasks. These capabilities are complemented by IntellectEU's unrivaled Swift integration expertise.

Benefits of using Catalyst Integration Manager to streamline implementation of the Swift payment experience POV:

A Single Point of Integration

Catalyst Integration Manager provides banks with a single point of integration to enable Swift services. Through custom translators, data mapping, and Swift API connectivity, Catalyst provides a one-stop solution to a multitude of Swift network integration use cases.

Low Complexity

Banks do not need to integrate with a variety of Swift APIs, handle the collective data, or stay up to date with newer releases and versions. This complexity is handled by our purpose-built integration solution.

Faster Time-to-Market

Banks only need to implement one system integration to achieve the full transparency and traceability offered by the entire Swift payment experience ecosystem. This means a shorter project timeline, and faster time-to-market.

Revolutionize customer cross-border payment experiences with IntellectEU

Financial institutions interested in working with IntellectEU to explore a Swift POV implementation powered by Catalyst Integration Manager can reach out to omar.rodriguez@intellecteu.com.