Wise Platform is proud to announce an exciting new collaboration with Swift, which will help increase cross-border payment options for financial institutions and their customers. This solution will offer more options for banks looking to enhance their international payments services, and will provide improved convenience for customers looking to send money across borders.

From today, financial institutions seeking to innovate their offerings will be able to route Swift payment messages directly to Wise Platform- Wise’s infrastructure solution for banks and major enterprises - through our latest Correspondent Services solution. This will enable their customers to benefit from the speed and convenience of Wise, and the breadth of Swift without needing to implement any major changes to their systems.

Before I go on, let me pause briefly and reflect on how we got here.

Wise was founded over 12 years ago as a money transfer business, helping customers around the world send money internationally quicker and at a lower cost than their traditional high street banks. To make this possible, we have built a global payments network that makes moving and managing money around the world faster and easier for 16 million personal and business customers.

But we have always known that what we’re building: money without borders for everyone, is bigger than just us. And we don’t necessarily believe that the best place for customers to send and manage money internationally is on the Wise app - it’s with their bank or financial institution.

Switching providers creates friction for customers, and many still don’t know they’re getting a bad deal on their international payments. So, about 6 years ago, we built Wise Platform to bring all the benefits of Wise to their bank, where they already are.

In a few short years we have grown extremely fast, and today banks and major enterprises all over the world leverage Wise Platform to power their own cross-border payment offerings, including Monzo, Google Pay, Bank Mandiri and Interactive Brokers.

But there are still challenges to overcome.

Most of our fintech and enterprise partners predominantly access Wise’s network via our easy-to-use API solutions, which are fast and easy to integrate.

However, we know that for big banks in particular, integrating an API is not always easy. Typically this is because a large bank is using infrastructure that wasn't designed to plug into the APIs of third parties, meaning technical projects like these can become quite a large lift for some of our partners.To enable banks to bring fast, low-cost and convenient solutions to their custom ers directly required a different, more seamless approach.

So we’ve been working hard to build a new Correspondent Services solution that will empower banks to innovate seamlessly and without the need for major technical overhaul. We will also enable banks to maintain access to familiar Swift features, including Swift GPI, a payment status tracker which Wise Platform will update to ensure end-to-end visibility across both networks.

Our network, combined with the strength of Swift’s infrastructure solutions, will help make international payments more convenient, faster and lower cost for banks.

And together, we have shown that it’s possible as an industry to create novel, innovative solutions that bring true value to customers using what is already available to us.

Thierry Chilosi, Chief Strategy Officer at Swift, said: "Swift has built an infrastructure that connects the world, that is trusted and relied upon every day. Our collaboration with Wise illustrates how Swift can be the bedrock from which the whole industry can innovate to improve cross-border payments and enhance the options available for customers across the globe. Cooperation such as this will be vital in our collective efforts to achieve the G20 targets for cross-border payments and enable the seamless, efficient and secure movement of value around a fragmented world."