(26 October 2020 – Singapore) DBS has launched a solution for corporate clients in Singapore and Hong Kong to track cross-border collections, or inward payments in real time.
More than 240,000 DBS corporate and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will be the first to utilise the solution, which is powered by Swift Global Payments Innovation (gpi). DBS plans to expand this offering to its other core markets in China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam in the coming months.
Traditionally, the tracking of cross-border collections tends to be highly manual. Businesses often rely on a copy of SWIFT message from the remitter, which confirms their remittance instruction has been processed by their bank. For interim updates, corporates have to depend on their bank or the remitter to find out the latest status of the transfer across multiple banks, which is tedious, costly and time-consuming.
With DBS’ Swift gpi solution, corporates can log into its online corporate banking portal, DBS Ideal, to get instant updates on where the incoming funds are in the cross-border payment chain.
Raof Latiff, DBS's group head of digital for institutional banking, said the real-time tracking of cross-border payments and collections helps businesses improve their working capital management and fosters trust with overseas counterparties.
“This in turn helps improve supply chain efficiencies and encourages economic growth, enabling countries to bounce back faster from the pandemic,” he added.
Eddie Haddad, managing director for Asia Pacific at Swift, said the new online inbound gpi capability will give corporates “more control of their entire payment flows”.