Nium, the infrastructure for real-time cross-border payments, has recently announced that financial institutions are now able to leverage the Swift capabilities and their existing Swift infrastructure to connect to Nium’s global real-time payments network.
This connection provides a cost-effective solution for financial institutions to connect to Nium’s global infrastructure, thus effectively eliminating the need for “costly” as well as “resource-intensive” API integrations.
Cross-border payments initiated via Swift can be completed on Nium’s network, resulting in quicker settlement, “end-to-end” transparency, and full traceability for most widely-traversed corridors.
For global businesses, navigating disparate financial systems and message formats can be a barrier to market expansion.
The lack of standardization, coupled with the need for “tailored integrations, often limits access to new opportunities.”
However, as the industry moves to more standardization, Nium looks to serve as a payment messaging facilitator, supporting “existing messaging formats, while bridging the path to new standards.’
This connection supports Swift MT message formats and ISO 20022 messaging, the latter of which the industry is in the “process of migrating as the new standard of cross-border payments worldwide.”
Over 80% of payments completed on Nium’s network will settle within 15-minutes, which is said to be “an important consideration in today’s on-demand economy.”
Nium receives MT/ISO messages and uses its global infrastructure in order to route these messages via “local clearing and real-time payment rails.”
Nium ensures that Swift’s GPI tracker is updated in real-time, allowing institutions to continue “leveraging this existing solution for payment traceability.”
The initiative limits integration efforts, “streamlines transaction screening and monitoring processes, provides transparency on payment costs, and minimizes intermediaries — resulting in fewer points of failure, better error handling, and improved data flow.”
In addition to this, given Nium’s “zero-deduction” flows, beneficiaries are guaranteed to receive the full amount sent, without having to incur any additional fees.
Ouribank, one of Brazil’s leading foreign exchange banks with reportedly more than USD$29 billion in transactions processed, is said to be “one of the first financial institutions to implement this connection.”
