Seven global banks - BBVA; Bank of New York Mellon; DNB; MYBank; Sberbank; Société Générale, and UniCredit - which collectively handle 33 million low-value cross-border payments per year, are already live with the service.

Using tighter service level agreements between institutions and pre-validation of data, Swift Go enables banks to provide their end customers a fast and predictable payments experience with upfront visibility on processing times and costs.

Stephen Gilderdale, chief product officer, at Swift, says: “Swift Go is a direct response to the needs of small businesses and consumers for fast, easy, predictable, secure and competitively priced cross-border payments. Our new service will allow banks to compete effectively in one of the fastest growing segments of the payments market, delivering a seamless experience for their customers.”

Swift is promising competitive pricing, with processing fees agreed between financial institutions upfront in order to provide customers with full transparency on costs.

Pricing will be key if the correspondent banking industry is to snatch back business lost to a host of non-bank money transmitters, many of whom rely on Ripple's alternative payment rails to disburse funds.

Isabel Schmidt, head of direct clearing and asset account services products, Bank of New York Mellon, comments: “It’s no secret that for many years consumers and small businesses have been running into varying pain points when transacting international payments. These challenges have included opaque costs and lack of certainty on how quickly funds are delivered to the final beneficiary. This is why BNY Mellon is pleased to be the first US bank to go live with Swift Go, a new service that overcomes all of these challenges and assists financial institutions in delivering a competitive, seamless, fast and predictable payments experience to their customers.”