Bradesco, one of Brazil’s biggest private banks, has put through the first pilot payment on Bank of America’s Cross Border Real Time Payments solution. BofA announced it on 29 September.
Nothing fancy on Bradesco’s end. The bank sent the payment over the Swift connection it already uses, and it arrived in Hong Kong dollars with a local beneficiary via Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System (FPS). BofA says the product is built for high volume, low value payments, with tracking as it moves, the full amount delivered and certainty on arrival.
BofA first flagged the service back in June for its corporate, commercial and financial institution clients, who’ll be able to use it through Swift or the bank’s CashPro platform. Early connections named then included SPEI in Mexico, Faster Payments in the UK and India’s Unified Payments Interface.
Christian Stolcke, head of Global Financial Institutions, Nonbank Financial Institutions and Governments in Global Payments Solutions (GPS) at Bank of America, said banks want speed without ripping up their setup. “Financial institutions want a practical way to accelerate international payments without disrupting the channels and processes they use today,” he said. “This pilot shows how Bank of America can connect those existing channels to real-time payment capabilities in markets around the world.”
Daniel Stanton, Payments Product Head in GPS, added: “Completing this first transaction demonstrates the practical application of our solution. It is an important step as we expand the capability to more countries, currencies and client payment types.”
The two banks are also trialling a separate US route over Swift to make international payments for consumers and small businesses quicker and more predictable.
Bradesco didn’t need a new link or a Hong Kong account to tap a local instant payment system there, and that’s really the selling point. The September announcement didn’t say when the service opens to all clients or how many markets will be live at that point.
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The sender’s side stayed exactly as it was. Bradesco used the Swift pipe it already had, and the speed came from BofA pushing the money into Hong Kong’s instant system at the far end. That keeps adoption cheap for other banks. The catch is that it’s only as fast as the number of receiving markets BofA has hooked up, so the pace of new corridors after this first one is what counts.
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