How the #SWIFTgpi roadmap came to be; from one-hit wonder to an industry change agent

As the summer break comes to an end and we enter the next phase of the professional year in the northern hemisphere, it is the best moment to make, with a fresh and rested mind, a recollection of the road so far as well as what will be our own next drivers and directions. If you’re not doing this, you’re doing it wrong.

I watched this summer a TED talk by Professor Angela Lee Duckworth on grit, the power of passion and perseverance. It sounded intimately familiar and reminded me of the last 3 years with the #SWIFTgpi initiative as a particular recent example.

Back in Jan 2016, at the moment when we were closing the gpi rulebook to enter the pilot phase, we felt that what had been achieved was not a one-off, the end of the line.

We had momentum with the banking community, positive feedback and bankers asking us “what is the next step?”. We felt that that momentum could be lost would we wait 1Y for the end of the pilot phase to look at additional opportunities. As soon as the rulebook was finished, we kicked off the pilot phase in February 2016 and started a parallel track on the gpi roadmap, at the time called the gpi “vision”.

The gpi vision

Our approach for the gpi vision was anchored on two simple principles

1. In the words of the program manager, “we have to keep pushing”. Yes, the gpi value proposition is a good start, but disruption will not stand still so by the time we come up with a product and it is adopted by banks, it will be likely not enough for the community to counter disruptive B2B trends and business leaving to fintech.
2. I came with from a different angle: address profitability issues. What disruption and fintech meant was not a short-term blow to bank revenues, but the beginning of a fundamental shift, away from traditional bank revenue models. And we just happened to be in a unique position to help the community take the friction away, for cross-border transactions that is. To do so, we should come with a way to help banks push back on ever-increasing operating costs and disrupted business and contribute to improve their waterline by co-opetition: participant banks reducing operating costs by working smarter together.

The simplified version for the communications-savvy, must have been “keep pushing back”. Like sailors expelling water from a ship with a hull breach.

I remember a moment at the end of February 2016 when Product Management was about to meet our IT to present the principles behind the Tracker. Worried about being constrained down the road by early decisions based on a single use case, I pushed PM a focused deck with diagrams for several other products (including exchange of rich remittance information, storage of original transaction details, request for payment, a documentation layer, short term receivables forecasting, accounts payable financing and accounts receivables financing to name a few) which could be built with such a “SWIFT in the cloud” component.

Then when we started to work on the gpi roadmap, we took these ideas and added some more to a total of 28, organized in two main groups “revenue enablement” and “cost reduction” and including initiatives on payables, receivables, sanctions screening, fraud fighting, liquidity management and supply chain financing. We had McKinsey help put together a story around those, which we then took between March and June 2016 to regional bank focus groups and two global workshops to discuss the next steps in the gpi.

Are we doing the right things ?

Out of those initial talks we were able to narrow the initial list of 28 additional ideas down to a handful: request for payment, rich payment data, stop & recall, an international payments assistant and interbank claims optimization.

In order to get organized, I set up a simple idea-to-product process we would then pragmatically take these initiatives through: from idea identification, then scoping (discussions with the community, proofs of value, etc), then design (incl any proof of concept), then build & test (including any pilots) to, finally, live. Born was the gpi “conveyor belt”.

Such process helped us phase our progress and deliverables, gate these initiatives through a series of check points with internal and external stakeholders and ensure all the way that we were doing the right things.

Making it happen

Now equipped with the initiatives and a process to run those through, the next step was to put the “machine” through its paces. We would start immediately “scoping” these 5 initiatives with our clients, in search for a “minimum viable product” for each initiative: a minimum set of features that put together could make a compelling-enough first product version that would be adopted by the community.

This would seem simple enough a task were it not by the 3000 target clients (Of the 10k+ institutions on SWIFT, 3000 initiate cross-border payments), based in 200 different countries: to be successful, we had to make sure that every single product feature provided a solid value add globally and then we had to select which features were part of the MVP.

I spent the summer of 2016 looking for a professional services team of 3 to help me -as responsible for the gpi roadmap- run this first 6m phase. Between September and December we run a series of customer workshops with sub-groups of 10+ banks per initiative, sometimes also with their clients, corporate treasurers. By the end of the year we dropped the interbank claims and request for payment initiatives and moved the rest to the design phase. By April 2017 we put the rich payment data initiative in our “special fridge”; by June 2017 the community asked us to add the tracking of cover payments and make it, with stop & recall, a mandatory gpi release for November 2018; by November 2017 we also got a request to add tracking of financial institution payments (central bank money).

And all the while this was happening my team was asked to contribute (sometimes extensively) so a series of additional initiatives:

• A Proof of Concept joining gpi and blockchain under a real time liquidity management reporting objective
• A global Industry Challenge organized in Singapore in September 2017 with our colleagues at Innotribe to explore with the Fintech community the idea of open innovation, Fintechs and banks collaborating through gpi’s open APIs to help banks reduce the time to market of new customer products. With the two winners, Access Pay and Assembly Payments, we started this year two Proof of Value exercises to explore the topics of notifications/forecasting for short term receivables and request for payment.
• Also towards the end of last year we started working on what would become the bank to corporate pilot in 2018

Rinse and repeat: the recipe for excellence?

This year we repeated the same process: regional workshops in April and May, followed by a global workshop in June.

We came back from those interactions energized, with lots of good feedback, having learned from many success stories, as more and more banks bring the gpi benefits to their corporate portals, and with a very clear view as to what the community’s priorities for 2019 are: a case management solution, to link the case management tools of participant banks and a pre-validation initiative to remove post-initiation friction from the transaction chain, in addition to expanding the reach of gpi payments to more banks and branches and exploring the possibility for real time cross-border payments.

The resulting gpi zeitgeist has been reflected in the updated version of the “Transaction Management Services” document (which can be found in the gpi website or via this link). Where in 2015 there was only a blank slate, we now start to have a pretty busy ecosystem:

Not all ideas come to fruition immediately, some take more time to see the light, some have to be shifted first to a different angle and some will never be able to progress further unless there is a significant change in their starting assumptions.

As an example, the “International Payments Assistant” idea that I had beginning of 2016 started as a quite simple concept, based on the need to make cross-border payments fool-proof to increase adoption and remove business-incapacitating post-processing issues for SMEs. Simple in concept but not in execution, we took good care of getting to the bottom of the STP issues reported by the gpi participant banks in order to be sure to identify the “killer app”.

This killer app turned out to be the pre-validation of beneficiary accounts so, for our global workshop of November 2017 we packaged the results of our co-creation in a first version of the initiative, only to be surprised by a mixed reception. It was only during the regional workshops of Q2 2018 that the community singled out this initiative as strategic and, with case management, one of the most important ones for 2019.

Also, one looks back in time and can only acknowledge that out of nowhere so much has been done and achieved during the last three years. And this happened with very little, in a pure start-up fashion, fueled by the passion and teeth-gnawing will of a select few, with the knowledge that what we were doing made sense, was the right thing and that we were at the center of the storm making it happen. I personally remember spending my 2016 vacation looking for resources to help us with the gpi roadmap, working 60h a week for long periods and asking for help through a particularly difficult period in 2017 and getting none and yet I continued pushing through, inch by inch. Now I look back and find just pride at what we did and where we are.

…one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success, and it wasn’t social intelligence, it wasn’t good looks, physical health and it wasn’t IQ; it was grit.

- Professor Angela Lee Duckworth, TED Talks Education 

Where do you want to go today?

Well, we live in interesting times all right.

Looking back these months it seems as if the weather forecast of financial disruption has become more stable. Blockchain hype has now transformed to background noise, and from the background and to the center stage we start having, by increasing degree of intensity, smart supply chains through IoT, Artificial Intelligence (retail bots), identity access management, the first steps of Banking as a Service -flexible access to financial services through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)- and digital everything.

It is also good times for the gpi. Now that every other SWIFT cross-border customer transfer is being processed as gpi, the question of when to decommission old SWIFT customer payments has recently been given a date: end 2019. If anything, one could forecast that the pace of development of new gpi services will actually increase, driven by increasing community expectations for the gpi to help address these new threats and trends while reducing time to market and halving costs thanks to co-opetition.

Come what may, like any good captain, make sure your boat and crew is in good shape, maintain the course, keep checking the weather and, above all, do not forget to have fun while you’re sailing!


(c) Pedro Mullor, 2018.

Additional information on the gpi's value generation initiatives as well as on the more strategic questions on the gpi objectives and vision can be found in the "gpi Transaction Management Services Overview" document in the initiative's website at SWIFT.com/gpi.

DISCLAIMER: the views expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved by my employer before it is posted and does not represent the official positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.