Swift has joined forces with London-based technology firm Wise to increase cross-border payment options for financial institutions and their customers.

The collaboration will allow financial institutions to route Swift payment messages directly to Wise Platform – the firm’s infrastructure solution for banks and major enterprises – through its latest correspondent services solution. Clients will benefit from the speed and convenience of Wise, along with the breadth of Swift, without needing to implement any major changes to their systems.

Wise Platform will harness advanced Swift capabilities to power its service, including cloud, application programming interface (API) connectivity, payment pre-validation, and other features of Swift GPI ­– a set of standards on cross-border payments – including a payment status tracker, which Wise will update to ensure end-to-end view across both networks.

The collaboration, announced in Toronto at the annual Sibos conference, is the start of a broader relationship, and comes as increased innovation and fragmentation in the financial ecosystem is creating more ways for money to move — and more consumer demand for choice, the companies say in a press statement.

It reflects the importance of new forms of collaboration to provide optionality, while maintaining secure, reliable and inclusive connectivity. It is also directly aligned with both G20 and United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals on the speed, transparency, cost and access of cross-border transactions, they add.

Wise’s global payments network enables over 57% of customers’ cross-border payments to settle instantly (in under 20 seconds), and over 90% to settle in under an hour.

Financial institutions only need to make one simple configuration change and their customers will instantly benefit from faster, lower-cost, and more convenient international payments, according to the statement.