AccessPay has been awarded €100,000 after being named one of two winners at an industry challenge event hosted by international payments network SWIFT.
- Company chosen to develop innovative payments concept
- Collaboration with SWIFT over the next three months
- Winning concept to aid banks and businesses with cross-border payment visibility and working capital management
At the two-day event held in Singapore, AccessPay was one of five start-ups to share their views on the challenges impacting cross-border payments.
Working with SWIFT’s global payments innovation (gpi) team and gpi subscribed banks, the team were tasked with demonstrating their innovative thinking by making recommendations for how FinTech companies can build additional overlay services on to the SWIFT gpi platform, a new standard for cross-border payments.
Overlay services deliberated at the event included improved corporate payments and cash management services, API integration into banks’ application processes, business intelligence to provide payments routing intelligence, as well as enhanced FX and hedging services.
AccessPay, a specialist in cloud-based payments technology, was successful with its innovative proposal, designed to enhance visibility of in-flight cross border payments for corporate customers.
AccessPay will now have the opportunity to work with SWIFT and gpi banks over a three-month period to bring its concept to life and participate in Sibos, SWIFT’s annual financial services event to be held in Toronto in October.
AccessPay’s Product Director, James Higgins, said:
“This was a fantastic opportunity for our business to present our proof-of concept initiative and discuss how best to support gpi and ensure the maximum benefit to the wider financial community. We’re delighted to be chosen as a winner of the industry challenge and look forward to the opportunity to showcase our ideas at Sibos.
AccessPay has championed the evolution of payments and finance since its establishment five years ago, and being able to work collaboratively to develop our proposition, we are in a position to further evolve the fast-moving payments industry and provide value to both banks and corporate customers.”
Christian Sarafidis, Chief Marketing Officer, SWIFT, said:
“The industry challenge was designed by SWIFT to actively encourage collaborative innovation around SWIFT gpi, together with FinTech firms and banks. The outcome to this challenge has been phenomenal; we are co-creating innovative overlay services over SWIFT gpi rails for the benefit of the corporate treasurer and I congratulate all involved. We look forward to seeing AccessPay developing their proof-of-value over the coming months.”
Access Systems (UK) Ltd, trading as AccessPay, provides a cloud based connectivity layer between a business’s finance systems, their banks and all of the major UK and International payment networks; such as BACS, SWIFT, SEPA, Faster Payments and Direct Debit. Delivered through one easy to use portal, manual intervention is removed, thus providing a significant time and cost saving, as well as better management information and better security.
SWIFT gpi is the new standard for cross-border payments, and combines real-time payments tracking with the certainty of same-day settlement. Since it became available in January 2017, 20 global transaction banks have come on-board, exchanging tens of thousands of gpi messages over SWIFT every day.