Two European banks have extended their offering of SWIFT Global Payments Innovation (GPI) services. UK-headquartered Standard Chartered is now offering the SWIFT Global Payments Innovation (GPI) service to customers in Germany. The bank, which has 1,200 branches in more than 70 countries, already rolled out GPI to its customers in the US and Singapore. Clients of the bank in Germany will now be able to make cross-border payments in euro or other major currencies from Standard Chartered's Germany booking centre.

The bank, which doesn't offer retail services in the UK despite having its headquarters in London, makes the majority of its profits in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In Europe, Germany is Standard Chartered's key clearing hub and euro is the bank's second most important cross-border payments currency. The bank's Francesco Miccoli said, “SWIFT GPI matches Standard Chartered’s aspirations to re-shape the cross-border payments industry and standards to effectively meet clients’ need for efficiency and transparency in payments. We are now SWIFT GPI ready in Singapore, the US and Germany and will be looking to explore new correspondent banking frontiers for our clients.”

Spanish bank Santander is also extending SWIFT GPI services to its clients in Spain, the UK, Argentina and Poland. The bank, which is Europe's fifth largest bank but also has operations in North and South America as well as Asia, will offer GPI to clients in Chile and Mexico before the end of the year, with further countries planned for 2019. Santander expects to make 80 per cent of its cross-border payments through SWIFT GPI by year-end.

Santander's Eva Bueno Velayos commented: “For us, SWIFT GPI represents a good opportunity to improve the experience provided to our clients in their international payments, making the process faster and more transparent while simultaneously making our internal processes more efficient.”

What are the benefits of GPI?

SWIFT GPI is a cross-border payments service that offers the following benefits to companies:

• end-to-end confirmation and fee transparency of their payments over the entire transaction life cycle;
• real-time payments tracking;
• better working capital management;
• faster, same-day use of funds, as almost half of GPI payments are credited within 30 minutes, many within seconds – and almost all% within 24 hours;
• end-clients can also track the status of their payments from end-to-end;
• a high level of visibility into each payment, including information about each bank in the payment chain and any fees that have been deducted.