The cross-industry collaboration tailors Swift’s global payments innovation (gpi) initiative to cater for the needs of corporate treasuries dealing with multiple banks by providing a single format for end-to-end tracking and integrated flows in ERP and treasury management systems.

Corporates and banks participating in the pilot include Airbus, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Booking.com, Borealis, Citi, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, IATA, Intesa Sanpaolo, JPMorgan, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Microsoft, National Australia Bank, Ping An Group, Roche, RTL Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Société Générale, Standard Chartered Bank and UniCredit. Swift has also invited leading treasury application providers to embed the payments messages generated under the trial into their own systems.

Corporate participants in the programme have welcomed the move. Lisa Wagner, group treasury manager at Microsoft says: “The ability to access a greater level of payment information in a timely manner through Swift gpi will bring immediate benefits to our payments experience with greater transparency and responsiveness to our vendors. Providing multi-bank information all in one place and in the same format fits into our modern finance roadmap.”

The standard design has been developed through a series of workshops with pilot banks and corporates. It supports FIN & ISO 20022 standards to allow corporates to access their payments status across Swift and bank proprietary channels.

”Corporates want to track payments in real time and get confirmation of credit to the beneficiary’s account,” says Marc Delbaere, global head of corporates at Swift. “This new multi-bank capability will enable that experience in a consistent fashion, across multiple banks and multiple corporates. Having this information instantly in the corporate treasury space is what corporate customers are asking for.”