BBVA Committed to the Exploration of Instant Payments

Thursday, January 14th, 2021

As the year has gone on, more and more headlines have been about instant payments. Consumer trends have continued to shift as people adapt to the uncertainty of 2020, social distancing and ever-changing restrictions. As consumer needs have changed, the payments industry has rapidly tried to fill them.

In a recent announcement, BBVA shared that it had participated in an experimental payment effort to connect the SWIFT gpi with Britain’s countrywide instant payment infrastructure. This test not only involved the BBVA Group, but also five financial institutions (FIs) in Asia, Pacific, North America and Europe. The results were then shared on Oct. 15 at the Sibos conference.

According to the announcement, the experimental effort was a success. It also exhibited the international potential to eliminate time-zone limitations that currently hinder payment processing. The real question was whether the connection of SWIFT gpi and immediate payment infrastructures could be expanded internationally. In fact, the pilot was so successful that it did indeed show the global potential that exists to eliminate the time zone restrictions – removing a huge obstacle to payment processing. 

“With the integration of SWIFT with the Faster Payment chamber, we are going to further enhance customer experience, adding real-time processing of payments in British pounds to the benefits gpi already offers, tracking from start to finish and transparent costs,” said Raouf Soussi, the head of Corporate Payment Strategy at BBVA, in the announcement. 

BBVA Remains Committed to SWIFT gpi

This most recent pilot is similar to the one presented last year at the 2019 edition of Sibos. The intent of that pilot was to test the viability of transferring money to any country in the world in a matter of seconds. At the time that these results were released, it was determined that transfer times could be further reduced by connecting the SWIFT gpi network with the instant payment networks that already exist in various countries.

So, what was the difference between these two pilots? The foreign exchange broker. Last year’s test payments were liquidated in euros, while the 2020 pilot payments were liquidated in pounds. Impressively, since it was first launched in 2017, BBVA has performed seven million operations thanks to gpi – with volume totaling more than €4,5 trillion.

BBVA has been a big supporter of this initiative from the very beginning. This makes it the first bank in Mexico, Spain, Peru and Turkey to offer this service. Customers can now enjoy the benefits via: BBVA net cash, the SWIFT FIN (MT101) channel and the direct ‘host to host’ channel.

“At BBVA, we continue working to offer our customers the different services of added value that exist around the SWIFT gpi initiative. We continue our very active collaboration with SWIFT for everything that we think could add value to our customers and to our own internal management,” said Alberto Arilla, the head of the SWIFT Global Center in BBVA’s CIB area.

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