Are global banks playing their cards right?

The rise in fintech over the last few years has produced many remarkable challenges to traditional banking. Most have been worthwhile advances, but the number of bad schemes and sometimes spectacular crashes has been significant. As a result, global banks have been relatively protected by their perceived safety. Traditionally conservative, they’ve been slow to adopt new advances while the nimble, tech-savvy disruptors have tap-danced their way to centre-stage. They work to business hours, take the weekend off, and communicate through a system that’s nearly half a century old. And as that system has been updated with advances like ISO20022 (itself only a partial, text-only solution), they’ve lagged behind in their implementation. Mastercard may have delivered a sharp wake-up call.

As this article in the Financial Times highlights, it’s no longer realistic to justify ignorance of innovation on the grounds of established safety. In the roll-out of Mastercard Move Commercial Payments (MMCP), we see the entry of a worldwide, tier-one enterprise into the landscape of 24/7/365 payments. Here’s a player of undoubted integrity, launching a payment system that’s free of the strictures of outdated messaging, and that doesn’t suffer the liquidity limitations of most fintech solutions. Mastercard’s network embraces more than 20,000 banks. Those that seize the opportunity now available to them will advance rapidly through simplified systems, fewer delays and an overall boost in competitiveness.

“There’s a huge opportunity to bring the intelligence and automation of domestic real-time payments to the global stage; flexible, modular solutions that integrate with existing infrastructure like SWIFT, standards like ISO 20022 and services like Swift GPI – while supporting emerging technologies such as digital assets and artificial intelligence – enables banks to innovate without disrupting core operations.”

Rasika Raina, Head of Product, Mastercard Move

Throughout our friendly relationship with Mastercard, it’s been clear that we share similar values and aims; in particular, we both see the value of harnessing and so enhancing existing systems, rather than throwing out baby and bathwater in the name of innovation. As Rasika Raina says, “There’s a huge opportunity to bring the intelligence and automation of domestic real-time payments to the global stage; flexible, modular solutions that integrate with existing infrastructure like SWIFT, standards like ISO 20022 and services like Swift GPI – while supporting emerging technologies such as digital assets and artificial intelligence – enables banks to innovate without disrupting core operations.”

This is an important consideration. SWIFT’s messaging may be limited, but it’s near-ubiquitous. 24/7/365 solutions need to work within existing technologies, otherwise their adoption becomes to disruptive. This is why our eKeyiD system was designed from the outset to work within the SWIFT MT103 message, transforming a text-only system into one capable of carrying unlimited data and documents.

We congratulate Mastercard on launching what promises to be a transformative platform for global commerce and cooperation.