SWIFT announced a proof-of-concept (PoC) to trial, global payments innovation (gpi) Link, a gateway to interlink e-commerce and trading platforms. SWIFT’s PoC will include bank and corporate participants. A prototype will be demonstrated at Sibos in London in September 2019.
The link will connect gpi members to multiple trade platforms thereby enabling gpi payment initiation, end-to-end payment tracking, payer authentication and credit confirmation. The gateway will enable the continuous monitoring and control of payment flows and the subsequent movement of goods by those trade platforms, as well as support application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as SWIFT and ISO standards.
The PoC addresses the need for DLT-based commerce to be supported by settlement using fiat currencies and enabling ‘off-ledger’ payment settlement based on gpi. The first stage of the PoC will work on R3’s leading blockchain platform, Corda.
In the PoC, corporates using the R3 platform will be able to authorize payments from their banks via gpi Link; gpi payments will be settled by the corporates’ banks, and the resulting credit confirmations will be reported back to the trade platforms via gpi Link on completion.
While the PoC initially addresses R3’s DLT-based trade environment, it will be extended to support other DLT, non-DLT and e-commerce trade platforms.
SWIFT gpi is supported by hundreds of banks around the world, including more than 50 of the world’s top banks, and processes more than $300 billion worth of payments every day.