Overview

SWIFTRemit is designed to support financial institutions' needs for low-value, cross-border person-to-person payments - otherwise known as remittances. More than 200 million migrants initiate between 1 and 1.5 billion remittances each year, and industry revenues from remittances are estimated to exceed USD 15 billion annually.

Remittances are an important source of activity for many banks, but they do pose some specific challenges. Banks active in the remittance market generally develop specific proprietary or bilateral services with other banks, but while these models are effective, they may lack scalability. Where open correspondent banking arrangements are used, these payments are undifferentiated from other cross-border services, and do not provide consumers with the required price and time transparency.

To address these common challenges, SWIFT has developed the SWIFTRemit service (previously known as Workers Remittances).

What does SWIFTRemit comprise?

Combining a contract template, a common market practice rulebook, an online reference data directory, messaging standards and services, SWIFTRemit supports all types of retail payment products and channels: account, cash, cards, cheque and mobile. It is an all-in solution that enables banks to offer consumers a unique channel for any type of cross-border person-to-person payment with a total price and time-delivery guarantee while ensuring cost-efficiency, fast business development and brand-independency for the bank.

Since its inception the service has been extended to support now also pension payments, real-time payments, cancellations and modifications as well as settlement provider facilities

SWIFTRemit - supporting mobile payments

Mobile payments represent an important - and growing - part of the remittances market. SWIFTRemit supports mobile instructed payments, mobile notifications and payouts. A mobile phone number can be used as an account identifier in the SWIFTRemit message exchanged, for example to credit a mobile wallet, or for beneficiary identity verification to authorise cash payouts.

Mobey Forum, with participation from SWIFT, issued a white paper with best practices for banks to deploy mobile payments services.