CROSSBORDER Eric Bayle, Head of Global Transaction Banking at Société Générale, says banks must embrace tech to better serve their customers Not so many moons ago, the world’s major banks enjoyed a cosy monopoly on payments, content to rely on what now seem archaic practices, like performing daily, or even weekly, batch payments between themselves. The result was a cumbersome process, with complicated transactions – crossborder payments in particular – frequently bedevilled by blocks in legacy systems that had been built in-house and allowed little visibility of what was happening to them. Not anymore. The tsunamis of digital technology and regulatory changes in the payments sector, have combined to increase customers’ demands to a point hitherto considered to be impossible: instant and frictionless, end-to-end transactions from one account to another, worldwide. One game-changer along that road has been the introduction of SWIFT gpi by the Europe-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, the dominant force in the larger payments network, which counts most of the world’s major banks among its members, and which now provides real-time tracking of transactions through its upgraded messaging system. Société Générale was one of the first big banks to convert to gpi. Another milestone is the phased introduction of ISO 20022, a new open and universal messaging standard for data-driven payments, which, by the middle of this decade, will allow for much greater interoperability between banks and other payment service providers (PSPs). A third, significant contributor is the emergence of fierce competition in the form of a new breed of PSPs, while the likes of card giants Visa, Mastercard and other standalone
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TheFintechMagazine | Issue 19
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