ICICI, Axis banks join Swift’s global payments initiative

Global payments leader SWIFT today said ICICI Bank and Axis Bank have become the first domestic lenders to sign up for its global payments innovation initiative, which already has over 70 other leading banks globally.

The initiative aims to enhance cross-border payments by leveraging Swift’s messaging platform and global reach and in the first phase, the initiative will focus on business-to-business payments.

Designed to help corporates grow their international business, improve supplier relationships, and achieve greater treasury efficiencies, the new service will enable corporates to receive an enhanced payments service directly from their banks.

The service offers key features such as the same day use of funds, transparency and predictability of fees, end-to-end payments tracking, and transfer of rich payment information.

Kiran Shetty, head of India and Subcontinent at Swift said, “by being the first domestic banks to join the global payments innovation initiative, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank reiterate their commitment to offering greater speed, transparency and predictability to their clients when it comes to cross-border payments.”

On the partnership, ICICI Bank’s Ajay Gupta said the association will help it to add value to its corporate clients.

“The global payments innovation initiative is one such initiative where we believe that our clients will immensely benefit with same day credit, increased visibility and certainty of charges. This will enhance the payments product in the correspondent banking portfolio thereby enhancing our value proposition to corporate clients,” Gupta said.

The Belgium-based Swift is a global member-owned cooperative and a leading provider of secure financial messaging services.

It provides its members a platform for messaging and standards for communicating, apart from offering products and services to facilitate access and integration, identification, analysis and financial crime compliance to over 11,000 banking and securities companies, market infrastructure and corporates in over 200 countries.

ICICI Bank