Standard Chartered announced in January 2020 the launch of SC GPI Track, a publicly accessible portal that offers the ability to trace all cross-border payments cleared through the Bank’s major clearing centres to its clients, as well as to their corporate and retail clients. This makes them the first bank to introduce a public platform to track payment status.
Similar to tracking the delivery of parcels, Standard Chartered’s clients and their counterparties can now obtain the status of any payments the Bank has processed in real-time, by simply entering SWIFT’s unique end-to-end transaction reference (UETR) associated with the cross-border payment on the public portal.
Standard Chartered was one of 12 member institutions and 10 multi-national corporates to participate in pilot trials of the service back in July 2018. It now claims to be the first bank to introduce a public platform to track payment status, well ahead of the November 2020 payments confirmation mandate.
Commenting on this launch, Lisa Robins, Global Head of Transaction Banking at Standard Chartered, said: “Corporations and financial institutions around the world rely on the confirmation of payments to facilitate the movement of goods and services in order to support the healthy growth of supply chains.”
“Given our longstanding history of supporting trade flows across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, we are continuously looking at ways to enhance the trust and dependability of cross-border payments,” she continued.
Alain Raes, Chief Business Development Officer at SWIFT said that the industry had long believed that “slow, opaque and costly cross-border payment was a technology problem.” However, with SWIFT gpi, it is possible for transparent and traceable cross-border payments.
He praised Standard Charted for understanding the apt reuse of their SWIFT infrastructure in a practical way, adding that ”With the launch of SC GPI Track, corporations and financial institutions will be able to further facilitate e-commerce by moving money faster.”
