ROUNDTABLE: THE JOURNEY TOWARDS FRICTIONLESS CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS

the past three years as well as its strategy. Wadivkar said that ‘instant and frictionless’ payments are the core of SWIFT’s strategy. “That is what we stand for and what you are trying to achieve,” he added.

Beyond payments, SWIFT is extending ‘instant and frictionless’ to securities and trade. “Today, we are talking about payments and that is the work we commenced six years ago with SWIFT said while underscoring that this is the conversion from a standard messaging outfit to a platform layer. and the disruption in the market and globally,” he said. Saeed emphasised that the learning curve for the customers is paramount, especially for a legacy relationship where technology, banks should understand whether customers are comfortable with the innovative technology or not.

Wadivkar closed his remarks with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) interoperability, the new element that was introduced by SWIFT making it easy for central banks to integrate digital currencies seamlessly with existing payment systems while facilitating transactions across borders.

Zameer Ajaz Punjabi, Vice President, Product Owner - Payments & Remittance at Mashreq Bank said that customer gpi (Global Payments Innovation) and continues with SWIFT GO and all other initiatives that we are working on to enable faster and low-cost payments across the world,” said Wadivkar.

He also highlighted how better-quality payment data is enabled by the adoption of the ISO 20022 standard. The structure of better quality data allows banks to address a plethora of challenges that they face today by increased automation, faster processing, more effective reconciliations, improved mitigation of financial crime risk and better insights on the purpose and context for payments.

“We are converting our traditional messaging network into an open platform where we can invite third parties, regulators and market participants to come and interact with the SWIFT network,” Wadivkar

Enabling a better experience

Digital transformation across the financial services sector is all about enhancing the customer experience for personal and business users alike. The emergence of new technologies and evolving customer requirements have heightened the need for banks to improve the process of cross-border payments.

Faisal Saeed, the Head of Retail Liabilities & Transaction Banking at Emirates NBD, said that the payments landscape is changing “quite” rapidly, and the digital-native banks have raised the bar when it comes to meeting customer expectations and demands.

“As one of the leading banks in the country, the real challenge is how do we balance the legacy base of our customers, the stock of a business that we manage, the disruptive innovative technologies experience has been Mashreq Bank’s core focus over the years ranging from frontend channel development to enhancement of various customer digital journeys.

“The financial service sector needs to build a fully automated end-to-end ecosystem wherein a lot of other functionalities that are currently being handled manually will be digitalised to ensure a complete frictionless seamless experience for the customers,” Punjabi said. He acknowledged that there is room for improvement given that a lot of backend processes are currently being handled manually.

The growing frustration with the traditional correspondent banking model, which is often considered cumbersome and costly in a world of real-time low-cost payments, is providing a fertile ground for the growth of non-bank providers. Today’s customers require their international payments to be equally seamless as domestic transactions.

From a neobank perspective, Seemanti Considine, the Head of Operations and Correspondent Banking at Wio Bank said that challenger banks are on the opposite end of the spectrum compared to incumbents, “because we banks” logic was something we heard in the past but right now what we probably see among fintech firms is “you need to work closely with the banks.” He said that there is growing collaboration and engagement between fintechs and incumbents.

“All the customer complaints that we received since we launched last September have been actually around lack of speed,” added Considine.

Banking customers are spoilt for choice when it comes to payment options and banks should provide services and products that go above and beyond to drive engagement and maintain a competitive edge in the Middle Eastern market.

Sethi said that there is a lot of ecosystem play in the regional financial services system while giving an example of BUNA—the cross-border and multi- are getting the digitally native customers who do not want anything to do with traditional banking but they are after instant gratification.”

Sanjay Sethi, the Senior Managing Director, Head of Global Transaction Banking at First Abu Dhabi Bank, said that this “you need banking and not currency payment system owned by the Arab Monetary Fund.

While responding to the question on the difference between digital-exclusive and traditional banks, Viplav Rathore, the Managing Director and Head of Cash Management for Africa, Middle East and Pakistan for Standard Chartered Bank said that sometimes banks are innovating for the sake of ‘innovation’. He gave an example of a CBDC that is being piloted under the mBridge project between the central banks of the UAE, Hong Kong, Thailand and China while noting that “we all somehow have to take the balanced approach and how much innovation is good and what is the innovation which is addressing the problems.”

Rathore said that as a corporate client of a bank and as a banker he