Payments systems have evolved significantly over the past few years, with many domestic systems, as well as the European Payments Council’s (EPC's) Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) scheme, moving faster to address end-users’ rising expectations in terms of velocity, efficiency and transparency. Banks and other payment service providers (PSPs), meanwhile, have taken steps to strengthen compliance processes and increase security, which is another pressing concern for end-users as payments speed up.
The final piece in the puzzle in this respect is global reach – extending the service level of today’s crop of local domestic systems to payments travelling from one jurisdiction to another. This remains very much a work in progress, but the foundations are there in the form of Swift’s global payments innovation (gpi) initiative and the increasingly adopted ISO 20022 messaging standard.
