With the backing of 11 large international banks, the Clearing House, EBA Clearing and Swift have collaborated in an effort to facilitate real-time cross-border payments. The companies completed a proof of concept with seven banks, through which the banks successfully exchanged payment and confirmation of receipt messages.
As part of this proof-of-concept demonstration, banks were able “to synchronize settlement in one instant payment system with settlement in the other and convert real-time messages between both systems,” the groups said. They added that the immediate cross-border payments proof of concept shows that existing regional instant payment systems can be used for cross-border payments and could provide financial institutions access to cross-border payments without the need to build and connect to a separate network.
The initiative uses the ISO 20022 message standards and takes advantage of existing infrastructure, technology and standards the groups said. ISO 20022 is a widely used standard that has already been adopted by a number of payments systems.