BBVA Group, the second-largest bank in Spain, has participated in a new pilot program to test the integration of SWIFT gpi with the existing Faster Payments Scheme (FPS) infrastructure in the United Kingdom for instant payments.

Announced on Thursday, BBVA joined five other financial institutions from Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific in the program.

Join your industry leaders at the Finance Magnates Virtual Summit 2020: Register and vote for the FMLS awards

The instant payment testing between the banks was completed successfully, and BBVA highlighted on eliminating the time zone restrictions in instant payments with the pilot.

“With the integration of SWIFT with the Faster Payment chamber, we are going to further enhance customer experience, adding real-time processing of payments in British pounds to the benefits gpi already offers, tracking from start to finish and transparent costs,” BBVA head of corporate strategy, Raouf Soussi said.

International Instant Payment Pilots

The Spanish bank also participated in an earlier instant payments pilot using SWIFT gpi. Last year, the bank participated in the testing of SWIFT gpi integration into the European Central Bank’s instant payment platform.

SWIFT, the inter-banking infrastructure used for international payments, launched gpi in 2017 to enable quick transfer of funds. The platform later launches global instant payments services using gpi.

BBVA revealed that it processed seven million operations using gpi, handling more than €4.5 trillion.

“At BBVA, we continue working to offer our customers the different services of added value that exist around the SWIFT gpi initiative. We continue our very active collaboration with SWIFT for everything that we think could add value to our customers and to our own internal management,” Alberto Arilla, BBVA’s head of SWIFT global center, added.