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AccessPay and Assembly Payments win SWIFT’s Global GPI Industry Challenge

SWIFT gives two FinTech start-ups the opportunity to work with the co-operative and gpi banks over a three-month period to further enhance cross-border payments, leveraging on SWIFT gpi. The two startups will receive up to 100,000 EUR each to further develop their innovative concepts and will participate in Sibos, SWIFT’s annual financial services event to be held in Toronto in October.

The two winners of the SWIFT gpi industry challenge held today in Singapore are:

AccessPay is a specialist in cloud-based payments technology who has championed the evolution of payments and finance since its establishment five years ago. Based in the U.K., their software sits between customers and their banks, allowing automation of their payment transactions more quickly and securely through a single platform.

Assembly Payments is a fully managed payments platform for online marketplaces and the sharing economy. Based in Australia, Assembly started four years ago with the mission of enabling people to create extraordinary customer experiences and unlock new business models with payments.

Over the course of two days, five startups participated in the industry challenge workshop with SWIFT and gpi banks to get their views on the challenges impacting cross border payments. The challenge also served as an avenue for them to brainstorm how FinTech companies could build additional innovative overlay services on top of the SWIFT gpi platform. Some of the services discussed included improved corporate payments and cash management services, API integration into banks’ application processes, business intelligence to provide payments routing intelligence, and enhanced FX and hedging services.

The event was supported by 40 representatives from 30 gpi banks from around the world.

Anish Kapoor

”This workshop challenge 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 are delighted to have been chosen as a winner of this challenge and look forward to the opportunity to showcase our ideas at Sibos,”

says Anish Kapoor, CEO at AccessPay.

Simon Jones

Simon Jones, CTO & Co-founder, at Assembly Payments adds,

“We are really excited about winning this challenge; the exposure we will receive will be invaluable to our business. We look forward to presenting our concept at Sibos and beyond.”

Christian Sarafidis

“This 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 and Assembly Payments developing their proof-of-value over the coming months,”

adds Christian Sarafidis, Chief Marketing Officer, SWIFT

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 onboard, exchanging tens of thousands of gpi messages over SWIFT every day.

Featured image via pixabay