Curve Cash works by adding funds to a separate Curve Cash card in the in-app Curve wallet, which can be used for purchases using the Curve card. Customers will receive 1% Curve Cash instantly on purchases made using the Curve card at over 60 high-street top brands including Amazon, Apple, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, TFL, Uber, Gett, Spotify, Netflix and many more. Full list of retailers here: Curve Cash Retailers

The offering is available across all Curve products; Curve Metal customers will earn 1% instant cashback on purchases at six retailers at a time, and can receive Curve Cash for an unlimited period; Curve Black customers will be able to choose three retailers at a time, and can also receive Curve Cash for an unlimited period; Curve Blue customers will be able to choose three retailers at a time, however the offering for Curve Blue users is introductory for 90 days.

Curve’s decision to introduce Curve Cash follows the launch of Curve Customer Protection in February 2019, offering faster purchase protection on eligible purchases of up to £100,000 made with any Curve card. Other Curve features include, fee-free spending abroad, and ‘Go Back in Time’ - a world-first innovation enabling users to switch the card used up to 14-days after a purchase.

“Curve cash introduces a whole new experience around Curve, rewarding our customers with instant 1% Curve Cash that they can use anywhere Mastercard is accepted” said Diego Rivas, Product Lead at Curve. “The launch of Curve Cash is just one example of the many ways Curve simplifies people’s finances, constantly delighting them by combining all their debit and credit cards into one and rewarding them with cash they can spend instantly.”

With this new BPN alliance relationship, Comdata — the largest commercial Mastercard issuer in North America, responsible for paying more than $55 Billion to 800,000 suppliers on behalf of its 30,000 buyer customers — gives buyers the ability to automate electronic payments to many suppliers through one network. By doing so, buyers are able to reduce costs, delays, and inefficiencies, promote payment transparency, and meet the unique needs and preferences of their suppliers.

“We’re thrilled to have Comdata join BPN as we continue to see an extremely positive response to the platform,” said Nick Babinsky, Vice President & General Manager, Business Payments Network at Billtrust. “This alliance provides all Suppliers accepting payments through BPN the ability to receive truly touchless transactions in their own preferred format from Comdata’s massive base of business buyers.”

“We believe that partnering with Billtrust on BPN allows buyers and suppliers the opportunity to focus on the relationships that they have cultivated over years of doing business together,” said Jack Sevier, Director of Product Strategy at Comdata. “As BPN ensures that payment for goods and services seamlessly aligns with companies’ preferred processes, it’s a win-win for all.”

Launched late last year, BPN is designed to address current industry challenges by:

Publishing a directory that contains a full view of participating suppliers and their payment acceptance preferences
Providing financial institutions and corporate buyers with ability to deliver digital payments directly to the suppliers’ acceptance platforms

Offering acquirers and accounts receivable providers the opportunity to accept payments directly from payables platforms
Enabling complex financial and payment data to seamlessly come together at scale while delivering streamlined reconciliation to suppliers and buyers 

Trustly currently offers cross-border payments to and from consumer bank accounts at over 3000 banks in 29 European markets, while PayWithMyBank enables merchants to offer consumer payments by signing into online banking at the point-of-sale, bypassing the credit card networks.

Oscar Berglund, CEO of Trustly, says: “This transformative merger creates the first and only online banking payments network with transatlantic coverage and accelerates our path towards global coverage. Together we’re thrilled to be able to offer merchants and billers a unique alternative to card payments, allowing them to accept payments from 600 million consumers across Europe and the US.”

Trustly holds merchant funds and is a licensed payment institution in Sweden, while PayWithMyBank does not hold any merchant funds. The merged group had revenues in excess of EUR100 million in the calendar year of 2018.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Wim Raymaekers, Global Head of Banking Market, SWIFT and Anders Olofsson, Global Head of Payments, Finastra

In recent years, the idea that the world has advanced from “ego-system” to “eco-system” economics has been made famous by the renowned business academic Otto Scharmer of the MIT Sloan School of Management. And it’s certainly a concept that springs to mind for me, when I’m asked how SWIFT’s gpi cross-border payments service has managed to grow its take-up and usage so rapidly across the world.

The driving force behind eco-system economics is collaboration. Why? Because success is no longer about pushing your own product in isolation. Instead, what really matters is how your product integrates with the other companies’ offerings that your customers are already using. Get that integration right, and you’re well on your way to a winning product.

It’s this insight that has powered the success of gpi since its launch in early 2017.  And it’s why we at SWIFT collaborate consciously and continuously with around 30 payments technology vendors—including Finastra—to enable banks to progress along their gpi-enabled journey to fast, seamless and easy cross-border payments.

Collaboration and integration

Around 70% of banks use third-party vendors’ products to provide payments services to their customers. So collaborating and integrating with these third-parties is imperative if we’re to ensure that our bank customers can embed the gpi experience into their own infrastructure. We want to present banks with a solution that’s not disruptive but positively collaborative—which is why we built gpi specifically to be able to reuse banks’ existing back office processes, sanctions screening, STP, currency applications and so on.

Similarly, in the interbank space we maximize the ease of integration by using the industry-standard MT 103 message type. And we cooperate with 55 different market infrastructures across the world that support gpi—including proprietary non-SWIFT platforms like TCH in the US and FXYCS in Japan. Banks will also be able to reuse the gpi business rules as the industry moves to ISO 20022.

All of this collaboration helps to ensure that any bank, anywhere in the world, can integrate gpi into its systems quickly and easily. And to make it even easier, we’ve built an additional information layer in the cloud on top of the gpi tracking database and above the whole chain of payments processing. This cloud database is updated continually as payments go from one bank to the next, and all banks using gpi can access it seamlessly via APIs.

Reaping the benefits of gpi

The resulting benefits for banks are substantial—and include reduced costs, improved customer experience, higher speed and greater transparency. SWIFT gpi enables banks to offer a better service to their customers because payments can be tracked in real time, with full visibility into key factors like routing, fees and time of credit. And in terms of speed, close to half of gpi payments are credited within five minutes, and many within seconds, adding further to the benefits for corporate treasurers.

What’s more, the greater visibility brought by the gpi Tracker feeds directly into lower costs, because banks have less need to contact each other to check where a payment is. This dramatic reduction in enquiries—especially from intermediary banks—represents a massive saving in administrative overheads, as well as enables banks to respond faster to customers’ questions.

It’s the combination of these transformational benefits with SWIFT’s collaborative approach that has enabled us to achieve such rapid adoption of gpi. Just over two years on from gpi’s full market launch, the figures tell their own story:

Continuing to innovate

These statistics underline the extent to which SWIFT is answering the call among banks and their customers for greater speed, transparency and tracking of cross-border payments. And the reality is that gpi’s transformational impact has only just begun—because here at SWIFT we’re continuing to innovate and collaborate to drive the benefits ever further and faster.

To do this, we’ve planned out an exciting future roadmap for gpi, reflecting our commitment to ensuring it delivers more both for banks and their customers—with the ultimate aim of making cross-border payments as fast and seamless as domestic ones.

One key initiative is extending gpi’s support for corporate services, by enabling all banks to provide tracking information to their corporate treasurer clients—a capability that’s now live following a successful pilot programme last year. The new gpi functionality allows multi-banked corporates to initiate and track gpi payments across all their banking portals through a single window integrated into their treasury management and ERP systems.

What’s more, we’re extending this capability further by enabling corporates to have visibility of incoming as well as outgoing payments and payment initiation services. And we’re working to add Request-for-Payment capabilities so corporate sellers can trigger cross-border payments from buyers.

In parallel, we’re collaborating to enhance gpi’s support for e-commerce through a new proof of concept, which enables participants involved in trade transactions on distributed ledger technology (DLT) ecosystems to settle the payment leg of their trades using gpi, and benefit from fast, secure settlement using a fiat currency. The first DLT infrastructure software provider collaborating in the pilot is R3.

Another area of innovation around gpi is faster case resolution when payments get stuck, due to inaccurate beneficiary account information for instance. This ‘in-flight’ payment investigation and resolution service available in the cloud will expand our integrated validation toolkit. And we’re running a pre-validation pilot program to enable initiating banks to check, via a real-time API-based mechanism, the beneficiary account information seamlessly with the ultimate receiving banks—thus minimizing errors and maximizing STP.

Finally, through gpi we’re taking cross-border payments into the world of instant payments. Following a successful trial of cross-border instant payments last year in Australia, we’re now trialing it in Asia Pacific—with banks in Singapore using the FAST service to process cross-border payments. We’re also collaborating with the ECB to enable instant clearing of cross-border payments in Europe via TIPS.

More to come

Powered by innovation and collaboration in today’s eco-system driven world, SWIFT gpi has made fantastic progress in just two years—confirming its status as the biggest innovation our industry has seen in decades. But there are still many more benefits to come for banks and their customers. Stay tuned!

According to research conducted by Minna, Europeans are getting very frustrated with managing subscriptions services. On average, consumers in the region now spend €334 per month on seven different subscription services, and 1 in 3 unknowingly pay for services they no longer use. As customers demand more intuitive digital banking experiences, the partnership with Minna will help Visa’s bank clients to drive new engagement and revenues, by solving customers’ subscription-related problems.

Visa will work with Minna to enhance the functionality, simplicity, and security of its platform by implementing a number of Visa’s APIs. Bank customers using the Minna platform can now monitor subscription charges and payments; cancel subscriptions via their online bank; securely sign up to new subscription services without a card number, and ensure subscription service continuity even when cards are lost or stolen. The increased usability of the platform will subsequently allow banks to better serve the needs of consumers in an increasingly digital economy.

“We are beyond excited to enter a strategic partnership with Visa to help European banks deliver a best in class customer experience. This partnership makes it possible for us to accelerate our European growth plans, and to take our subscription management platform to the next level by leveraging Visa’s cutting edge APIs”, says Joakim Sjöblom, CEO, Minna Technologies​.

“A critical part of our role as a network is to enable our clients to access simple, innovative solutions that make life easier and safer for their customers. The subscription economy plays an increasingly integral part of our everyday buying experiences. Our partnership with Minna will mean that our banking clients and partners can introduce an innovative new service within their banking apps, and utilize Minna’s existing relationships with a network of subscription billers” says Antony Cahill, Managing Director, European Regions, Visa​.