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Swift for Payment Market Infrastructures Payments

Swift for Payment Market Infrastructures

Delivering secure, reliable, and efficient messaging to enable payment market infrastructures to process transactions, mitigate risk and increase operational efficiency

Swift for Payment Market Infrastructures

Responding to structural shifts within the payment market infrastructures landscape 

Payment market infrastructures (PMIs) include High Value Payments RTGS systems, Low-Value Payments/ACHs and Real-Time Retail Payment Systems (RT-RPS), and are critical service providers. 

PMIs face a number of challenges, including regional market integration, international expansion, the need to automate and be more cost-efficient, offer new services and replace legacy systems. And as ISO 20022 rapidly becomes the international market standard, there is the added challenge of ensuring a harmonised global approach to adoption.

The evolving geopolitical landscape, growing risk of cyberattacks and IT dependencies make it more critical than ever for PMIs to demonstrate higher levels of risk management, transparency and operational resilience. 

PMIs have to work. Consistently and reliably

PMIs must, deliver secure, reliable, efficient and cost-effective payment clearing and settlement for their community, at scale. PMIs are impacted by fast evolving and potentially disruptive technologies, by direct and indirect regulation, the need to control costs, and the ongoing evolution in standards. Swift’s expertise in innovative technologies, messaging and standards enables us to partner effectively with FMIs to help address these challenges and find cost effective and reliable solutions. 

  • Manage risks and costs 

  • Ensure resilience 

  • Respond to changing demands, such as real-time

Swift for High Value Payments Systems / RTGS

High Value Payments Systems (HVPS) are at the heart of the financial eco-system. They need to offer efficient clearing and settlement services for large value and high priority payments, and must ensure they are resilient enough to withstand a variety of threats to their security and integrity. Swift supports more than 80 HVPS providing common standards, and a highly secure and resilient messaging service. 

Standardised payment flows for High-Value Payments Systems / RTGS 

  • Interbank payments processing
    Allows participants to submit customer and financial institution payments to the RTGS system and receive credit or debit notifications, if settlement has been confirmed. 

Based on Swift MT or ISO 20022, exchanged over Swift Copy services, or FIN. 

  • Liquidity management 
    Enables participants to exchange information with the PMI to monitor their accounts, operate their reserve, manage their payments or act on their limits (usually through participants’ liquidity management application). 

Based on Swift MT or ISO 20022, exchanged over FIN, InterAct or via Web-based application. 

  • Report management
    Allows participants and MIs to exchange batches of financial messages and large statistical, operational or regulatory reports. 

Based on Swift MT or ISO 20022 (or proprietary format). Can be exchanged using FIN, InterAct or FileAct. 

  • Interlink with ancillary systems
    Allows MIs to communicate with ancillary systems (for example ACH, CSD and other HVPS). 

Based on Swift MT or ISO 20022 (or proprietary format). 

Swift for Low Value Payments Systems / ACHs

Low Value Payments Systems (LVPS) clear millions of retail payments for national or regional communities. They need to offer efficient clearing, netting and settlement services to their participants, balancing cost, process efficiency and risk mitigation. They need to meet increasing demands for interoperability with other retail payment platforms. 

Swift supports more than 25 LVPS providing a standardised, reliable and scalable messaging platform. 

Standardised payment flows for Low-Value Payments Systems / ACH

Swift offers a scalable and reliable platform that supports cost efficient and interoperable file transfer services for interbank processing of retail payments within and across automated clearing houses (ACHs). 

Files can include Swift MT, ISO 20022 or proprietary messages, exchanged over FileAct. 

Business flows include: 

  • Interbank payments processing 

  • Exception handling 

  • Transaction status reporting 

Standardised payment flows for Real-time Retail Payment Systems 

Standardised and orchestrated business flows are of key importance in achieving 

instantaneous clearing and settlement. 

All flows are based on ISO 20022. 

Business flows include:

  • Payment initiation 

  • Interbank payments processing 

  • Transaction status reporting

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