EBA CLEARING, SWIFT, and The Clearing House (TCH) announced this morning that they will launch a pilot program for immediate cross-border (IXB) payments. The pilot will support payments in dollars and euros.

Why should we care?
This initiative represents a concerted effort by payments networks to compete with scrappier challengers like Wise (though at much higher volumes). By letting banks use domestic payment options to make these IXB transfers, EBA, SWIFT, and TCH—which are private-sector firms owned by member banks—hope to keep payments services internal to their networks, rather than mediated through startups that threaten their market share. "Aside from delivering a simple and transparent service for end users, our key aim is to keep things easy for financial institutions: the fact that there is no need to connect to a separate payment system should make the service very attractive for RT1 and RTP participants of all sizes," said Erwin Kulk, Head of Service Development and Management at EBA CLEARING. That ease can let IXB offerings scale quickly, and therefore minimize challenger market share more easily. This showdown within the payments landscape looks a lot like the competition within retail trading: In both spaces, established players have mimicked the customer-growth strategies of successful startups, which have paved the way through low-cost, instantaneous services. Consumers may expect their banks to market their new international-payments services by the time IXB payments become a full service offering in 2023.