Sterling Bank leads with foreign payment solutions

Sterling Bank Plc has said it is the first bank in West Africa to go live on SWIFT Global Payments Innovation (GPI). SWIFT gpi dramatically improves the customer experience by increasing the speed, transparency and endto-end tracking of cross-border payments.

The Executive Director, Corporate and Investment Banking, Yemi Odubiyi, in a statement said the introduction of SWIFT GPI has transformed cross border payments for the benefit of customers.

He said, “Sterling is the first bank in Nigeria and West Africa to achieve SWIFT gpi implementation, as this was driven by our commitment to provide faster, transparent and traceable international payments.”

Odubiyi added that other benefits of SWIFT gpi includes, receiving confirmation message when beneficiary has been paid, ensuring remittance data is unchanged when payment arrives at the destination Bank, Stop and recall - allowing payment messages to be immediately stopped in case of fraud or error, no matter where they are in the gpi transaction chain.

About 40 percent of SWIFT gpi payments are credited to end-beneficiaries within five minutes; 50% are credited within 30 minutes; and almost 100% within 24 hours.

The bank said it will continue to be a first mover in the adoption of technologies that makes banking transactions more efficient and seamless for retail, corporate, institutional and commercial banking customers in the country.