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Real-time payments network Thunes Ltd. announced early Monday its connection to Swift, the Brussels-based international financial-messaging network, will enable financial institutions to support the sending and receiving of money to and from more than 3 million mobile wallets globally.
Using Thunes’s Direct Global Network, which covers 130 countries and 80 currencies, financial institutions can send instant cross-border payments directly to mobile wallets using their Swift connection, Thunes says.
The partnership is expected to expand financial institutions’ ability to reach mobile-wallet users around the world to better serve underbanked consumers, Thunes says.
In addition, financial institutions will have access to Thunes’s SmartX Treasury System and Fortress Compliance Platform.
“Opening our Thunes Direct Global Network Membership to the banking community perfectly aligns with our mission to make the global economy accessible to all,” says Thunes chief executive Floris de Kort, in a statement. “We’re building bridges between bank and wallet ecosystems to facilitate frictionless payments in previously unreached regions.”
In related news, real-time cross-border payments provider Nium Pte. Ltd. announced it is also leveraging its connectivity to Swift to enable real-time payments. The move is expected to spare financial institutions from having to develop their own application programming interfaces to connect to Swift, Nium says.
Nium’s connection to Swift supports Swift MT message formats and ISO 20022 messaging, which the company says will reduce manual intervention, increase accuracy, and improve fraud prevention. It will also boost the ability of financial institutions to exchange detailed remittance information, Nium says.
Financial institutions leveraging Nium’s connectivity to Swift can streamline transaction screening and monitoring processes, offer more transparency on payment costs, and minimize intermediaries, resulting in fewer points of failure, better error handling, and improved data flow, Nium adds.
More than 80% of payments completed on Nium’s network settle within 15 minutes. Nium receives Swift message type/ISO messages and routes them through local clearing and real-time payment rails. In addition, Nium updates Swift’s Global Payment Innovation (GPI) tracker in real time, allowing institutions to continue leveraging this existing solution for payment traceability, the company says. The tracker offers real-time status updates on cross-border payments.
