BBVA collaborates in the first international instant payment pilot, led by Iberpay and Swift

Iberpay, Swift, BBVA and several international banks have successfully completed the first pilot to process, in a real environment, instant payments between different currency areas. Their ultimate goal is to improve these international payments involving currency exchange in terms of speed, transparency, cost, availability and accessibility.

Iberpay and leading Spanish banks such as BBVA, Santander and CaixaBank have carried out the first test of this pioneering service in Europe in anticipation of the official entry into force, on November 28th, of the new One-Leg-Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) scheme of the European Payment Council (EPC). The objective is to improve these international payments, in line with the guidelines of several global bodies such as the G7, G20, Financial Stability Board (FSB), Basel Bank for International Settlements (BIS), European Commission, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

During this pilot phase of the service, dozens of actual payments originating from banks in other currency areas (National Australia Bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Itaú Unibanco in Brazil and Lloyds Banking Group in the UK) and sent through the Swift GPI Instant service have been processed, settled, and credited in a matter of seconds to the ultimate beneficiary customer’s account, thanks to the final delivery of the payment through Iberpay’s instant transfer service.

This pilot initiative included, as a world first, the integration of Iberpay’s instant transfer platform, which operates 24/7 in real time, with Swift’s GPI tracker, providing end-to-end visibility of payment status and greater transaction transparency.

Some of the main advantages of this initiative include the possibility of processing international payments 24/7 within seconds, end-to-end payment traceability. All of this allows us to improve the customer’s user experience, offer new use cases and develop innovative services that compete with new players in this payment sector.