INFRASTRUCTURE As SWIFT launches ambitious new plans, we caught up with Mark Buitenhek, ING’s Head of Transaction Services and a SWIFT board member, to find out more about the cooperative’s thinking, the role that open banking will play in reshaping the industry, and how the West can keep up with the fast-moving Asian payments landscape The payments world is changing rapidly and Mark Buitenhek, ING’s head of transaction services, is at the heart of it. As a board member at SWIFT, he helped set the scene for the banking cooperative’s forward-looking new strategy at Sibos 2020 – itself a much-altered event this year, in light of the ongoing pandemic. “SWIFT wants to go further than it’s done before,” says Buitenhek. “It wants to make international payments as simple as domestic payments are, and, to accomplish this, it has created a platform vision that we launched online at Sibos.
The ultimate beneficiaries will be our clients, because with these moves, we, as financial institutions, will be able to provide them with more and better payment services.” SWIFT’s bold new strategy seeks to expand beyond financial messaging to provide comprehensive transaction management services, enabling seamless transactions from one account to another, anywhere in the world, with end-to-end transparency and predictability. This approach will support and accelerate innovation, paving the way for financial institutions – independently, or in collaboration with fintechs – to create new, value-added services to support their business growth. The planned platform capabilities build on SWIFT’s recent successful transformation initiatives, including SWIFT gpi, a new benchmark in crossborder payments messaging, and will be underpinned by SWIFT’s continued investment in cybersecurity and risk management to ensure resilient and secure transactions. Users will benefit from the capabilities, with minimal disruption through backward compatibility.
Collaboration with bright fintechs in this brave new world of payments is important for Buitenhek. At Sibos 2020, ING used its virtual ‘stand’ at the online event to promote a number of the fintechs that it’s been busy working with. “We were supposed to be in Boston this year but we adapted quickly so that we could present them in a virtual way,” he explains. “We brought some exciting, innovative ideas, for instance a digital vault that corporates can put their know your customer (KYC) material in, and then open it up for other banks, rather than having to send the information to multiple institutions.” We also showcased Cobase, which is an aggregator platform we are working with, and FINN, an Internet of Things company – all cool stuff. Despite the pressure everyone has felt over the past six months due to COVID-19, one big plus of the pandemic – if anything associated with it can be positive – is that there has been an enormous boost in terms of innovation and digitisation. “Contactless payments are basically everywhere, online and ecommerce businesses have thrived, digital signatures, you name it. This is actually the dream for those who talk about digitisation, to reach something in just a few months, where normally it would take years to get there.”
Opening up the future of payments www.fintechf.com
Issue 7 | ThePaytechMagazine
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