Quick, easy, predictable: Delivering the payments experience customers expect

International payments are the lifeblood of the global economy. And whether it’s an individual sending money overseas to family and friends or a business paying a supplier beyond their borders, customers expect transactions to be fast, transparent, simple and secure.

Increasingly, regulators are demanding it too. The G20 has set targets for enhancing the speed, transparency, cost, choice and access of cross-border payments - and the Swift community is making great strides ahead of the 2027 deadline.

Now, we’re going even further, working with financial institutions to further elevate the customer experience by embedding Swift services directly into their client-facing channels.

Delivering the benefits of Swift solutions to end customers

Financial institutions all over the world already use Swift solutions to streamline their payment processes. By embedding these solutions into customer channels – as some financial institutions are already doing to great effect – individuals and businesses can experience these benefits too.

The opportunities are clear. McKinsey estimates that the low-value international payments market alone – defined as transactions worth $100,000 or less – is worth around $12 trillion.

To tap into this market and raise the standard of international payments across the board, payment providers need a simple way of offering their customers the experience they expect.

How Swift is helping

So what do customers want? According to our research, which polled over 4,200 consumers and 2,700 SMEs, hidden fees, unclear exchange rates and failure to deliver a payment are the top three reasons for customers to take their business elsewhere.

As this shows, transparency is key to meeting customer expectations, and payment providers must prioritise it to succeed.

This transparency already exists today between financial institutions, thanks to the end-to-end tracking provided by Swift. By bringing this experience directly to end customers via apps, websites and other customer channels, financial institutions can better meet customer expectations, retaining existing ones and winning back those that have switched to a different provider.

Not all institutions will have the in-house capabilities to integrate Swift services into their front-end channels, so we’re also working with business application providers that can help. By outsourcing the technical details, payment providers of all sizes can speed up their time-to-market, reduce costs, and give their customers the experience they want.

A true end-to-end experience

Our goal is to enable our community to bring clarity and confidence directly to customers at all stages of the payment journey. And to achieve this, our pilot group is combining many of the Swift services our community already have.

A key enabler

Swift Go empowers providers to offer their consumer and business customers a quick, easy and fully transparent cross-border payments experience. There are no extra fees applied as a Swift Go payment moves along its journey, meaning end customers get a full view of all charges upfront and know exactly how much will arrive in the end beneficiary’s account.

Before the transaction

Payment Pre-validation checks that a given beneficiary account exists and matches its account owner before a payment is sent.

During payment initiation

SwiftRef can be used to pre-fill payment message fields, instantly making payment initiation simpler and easier.

After a payment has been sent

The Swift GPI Tracker provides end-to-end tracking throughout the payment’s journey.

Making the vision a reality

In collaboration with our community, we aim to develop mutually agreed quality guidelines, as well as APIs for providers to embed Swift services into their customer channels.

25 institutions from all around the world are taking part in the exploration phase, including:

We’ll be sharing more details later in the year, so stay tuned.

Want to learn more?