Standard Chartered has announced the launch of SC GPI Track, a publicly accessible portal that offers the ability to trace all cross-border payments cleared through the bank’s major clearing centres to its clients, including corporates.

As one of the first banks to introduce a public platform to track payment status well ahead of the SWIFT November 2020 payments confirmation mandate, Standard Chartered has paved the way in providing an enhanced cross-border payment experience for its clients. 

Similar to tracking the delivery of parcels, Standard Chartered’s clients and their counterparties can now obtain the status of any payments the bank has processed in real-time, by entering SWIFT’s unique end-to-end transaction reference (UETR) associated with the cross-border payment on the public portal.

“Corporations and financial institutions around the world rely on the confirmation of payments to facilitate the movement of goods and services in order to support the healthy growth of supply chains,” commented Lisa Robins, global head of Transaction Banking at Standard Chartered. “Given our longstanding history of supporting trade flows across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, we are continuously looking at ways to enhance the trust and dependability of cross-border payments.”

“For far too long, the industry wanted to believe that a slow, opaque and costly cross-border payment was a technology problem,” noted Alain Raes, SWIFT’s chief business development officer. “With SWIFT gpi, the global financial system has demonstrated that transparent and traceable cross-border payments are a reality today. On average, 40% of gpi payments are credited to end beneficiaries within 5 minutes and 50% are credited within 30 minutes.”

“With the launch of SC GPI Track, corporations and financial institutions will be able to further facilitate e-commerce by moving money faster,” Raes continued. “We view that as a sign of leadership, foresight, and innovation.”