What is GPI?
In response to the universal challenge global banks and corporates faced in obtaining statuses of international payments, SWIFT launched the Global Payment Innovation (GPI) solution to offer the global payments ecosystem transparency, speed, and visibility into the status of payments initiated over the SWIFT network. Through GPI, the global banking community has defined new standards for international payments, with rules around reporting into the central GPI Tracker. This includes details such as payments’ traceability, transparency around value dating, and fees associated with the payments.
A specific Unique-End-to-End Transaction Reference (UETR) is assigned to each transaction, which follows the payment through its entire lifecycle. A UETR is a string of 36 unique characters featured in all payment instructions carried over SWIFT. Throughout the payment journey, each bank in the payment flow reports into the GPI Tracker the status and potential fees, as well as ultimate value date of the credit. The UETR is effectively the identifier for the payment, acting as a single source of truth for a payment and provides complete transparency for all parties in a payment chain.
To ensure compliance and consistency across the SWIFT community, SWIFT has developed a GPI Universal Confirmation Rulebook, which includes timing and practices to meet SWIFT GPI. One of the measures for compliance is that a member needs to confirm at least 80% of their MT103 payments to the GPI Tracker, within a maximum of 2 business days. This percentage is calculated on a weekly basis.
Members out of compliance with the Rulebook can remediate their position over a period of 12 weeks to become compliant. SWIFT publicizes a list of those out of compliance, which excludes non-compliant members from search functionalities in the Tracker and can create unnecessary reputational risk.
While the original premise and solution for GPI was around payment tracking, new functionalities are being rolled via APIs or otherwise, including Stop & Recall, Pre-validation and Case Resolution. These feature functionalities can be built into your workflow and client services, automating investigations and enhancing your clients’ experience.
Axletree can help you build this integration.
How can you leverage GPI for enhanced client experience?
By integrating GPI into your payments workflow, you will be able to strengthen your payments business, offering your clients international payments in a seamless and faster fashion, closer to the real time nature of domestic payments than ever before. This includes payments predictability, fee transparency and payment status.
Axletree can provide clients the ability to expose the details and status of their payments in the tracker as a value-added service to their corporate client base, for self-service and instant response. Investigations teams do not have to spend hours searching for payment status and can be redeployed for other activities.
What Axletree can offer?
- Expertise in payments workflow
- Integration of GPI into payment management end-to-end
- Build GPI tracking functionality into your electronic banking platform
- Embed GPI into self-serve tools for strengthened service offering and enhanced client experience
- 24/7/365 global support
FAQ
We have 2 solutions, the first allows for access to the GPI tracker provided by SWIFT using MT messages or API calls, and the second is our in-house integration solution, Symmetree by Axletree, which also provides enhanced reporting capabilities.