The problem with Business-to-Business (B2B) payments is that to achieve full automation and STP there needs to be general ledger (GL) to GL integration plus much more information about the order, invoice and receipt needs to be exchanged. Payment systems are not designed to carry this level of information.

Steve Cohen and his team at Global Payment Information Exchange (GPIE) have developed a service to do just this. The additional information on the order, invoice and receipt is carried by a separate system which is fully integrated with the payment systems - currently US ACH, cross-border wires, Fedwire, SWIFT messages are carried, see figure.

GPIE B2B payment service overview

Source Copyright©2012 - GPIE

GPIE has a team of 100+ programmers developing the interfaces and links to the corporate's systems to achieve the full automation of the processes.

In the chart above, both parties are part of the GPIE network and the recipient's invoice information had previously been entered onto the system and had been accepted by the payer, then the process is as follows:

• payer agrees to pay the recipient's invoice:
  • payment and remittance information is sent to the GPIE server
  • information is available to both parties. The payer can see their payment, and the recipient can see that a payment has been scheduled
• GPIE server sends the payment information to the payer's bank
• message is translated from the payer's electronic format to the bank's standard format
• payment information is sent to the GPIE server
• if the transaction involves different currencies, the currencies are exchanged at the spot rate or contracted rate – whatever is stipulated by the agreement.
• payment and remittance information is sent to the recipient.
• payer's bank transfers the funds from their payer's account to the recipient's account
• recipient receives the funds

Current usage
When GPIE began operations they sold their solution direct to corporates and currently have many corporate users world-wide. They now also sell the service to banks to white label with some of the largest banks using the service.

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It will take forever for all corporates to adopt ISO 20022 and other standards. The GPIE solution overcomes this problem. The key to the solution is not just the GPIE network and servers, it also the 100+ programmers developing the GL interfaces and APIs.