DBS Bank has launched real-time online tracking of cross-border collections to provide greater digital convenience to its corporate clients – claiming to be the first bank in Asia to do so for both collections and payments.
This builds on the bank’s industry leadership in 2018 to enable businesses to track the status of their cross-border payments in real-time and online, which is built on the SWIFT Global Payments Innovation (gpi).
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Potentially, more than 240,000 of the bank’s corporate and SME clients in Singapore and Hong Kong can benefit from real-time, online tracking of their cross-border payments and collections, for no additional fee.
Raof Latiff, DBS’ group head of digital for institutional banking, says that the importance of enabling real-time tracking of cross-border payments and collections in today’s business environment “cannot be underplayed”, as it 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 adds.
The bank says its market share of SWIFT cross-border payments across its core markets increased by 4% year-on-year.
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According to DBS, the tracking of cross-border collections, traditionally, tends to be highly manual. Companies often rely on a copy of SWIFT message from the remitter, which confirms their remittance instruction has been processed by their bank.
For interim status-updates, corporates have to depend on their bank or the remitter (via remitter’s bank) to find out the latest status of the transfer across multiple banks. This is a tedious, costly and time-consuming process.
DBS’ platform gives instant updates on where the funds are along the payment chain. With real-time visibility to incoming cash flows, corporates can better manage their cash and working capital.
In addition, businesses can fulfill their commercial obligations quicker by releasing goods upon the receipt of payment from the overseas counterparty, optimising inventory and cash cycles and building more efficient supply chains.
