Day two of Sibos Frankfurt 2025 highlighted how global banks are modernising their cross-border payment infrastructures. Phil Carmalt, head of product for global payments solutions for Asia Pacific at Bank of America, outlined the bank’s progress on the G20 roadmap to improve speed, transparency and cost, and its plans to deliver true cross-border real-time payments. He also explained how Bank of America is helping clients mitigate foreign exchange (FX) risk, and respond to new market infrastructures and industry initiatives such as Swift’s shared digital ledger. Delivering transparency and speed through Swift GPI Carmalt said Bank of America is “making progress towards solving some of the G20 objectives” and highlighted transparency. “Swift GPI has been a great enabler and at Bank of America, we have supported Swift GPI from the pilot stages,” he noted. The bank has integrated global payments innovation (GPI) with its CashPro banking platform and “we see it delivering real value”. This additional transparency “has also helped shorten the end-to-end settlement time and therefore improve speed as well.” Exceptions, he stressed, are “what cause the delays.” To address this, Bank of America is improving the speed of exception handling by providing digital platforms for clients to initiate investigations and returns. This mirrors a broader Sibos theme that digitising back-office processes can help increase efficiency. Reducing cost with automated FX and guaranteed rates Carmalt also highlighted an innovation the bank has rolled out called “Auto FX,” which “helps reduce the total cost of the transaction by ensuring that wholesale FX rates are applied rather than retail rates”. He added that in today’s fluctuating environment, mitigating transactional FX risk is a priority for clients with international operations and supply chains. One solution gaining adoption is a Guaranteed FX Rates, “where we allow our clients to lock in FX rates for a tenor up to one year.” This “helps them mitigate FX risk and also simplify their forecasting,” he said. Guaranteed FX Rates complement Bank of America’s Auto FX capability to deliver more predictable cross-border payment rates. Preparing for Swift’s shared digital ledger and post-ISO landscape Asked about market infrastructure changes, Carmalt said that at Sibos, “Swift announced a single digital ledger initiative involving 30 banks, including Bank of America, as participants.” He added that “Swift has done an excellent job in setting standards and driving interoperability” and is well placed “to drive the industry together on this.” His remarks reflect growing interest among banks in shared ledgers to reduce fragmentation and improve liquidity. Building cross-border real-time payment capability Carmalt sees the biggest potential impact on the G20 objectives coming from “true cross-border real-time payments, 24/7, leveraging RTPS (real-time payment systems).” He said Bank of America “is embarking on a journey of delivering cross-border real-time capabilities to our clients” with three pillars: leveraging its branch network and strong US market share for book transfers to Bank of America beneficiaries; gaining direct access to real-time rails in markets that support “one leg out”, allowing overseas payments to be routed through domestic rails; as well as partnering with trusted third parties to deliver the last mile in corridors where the bank lacks direct access. “Once we deliver this, this will make a fundamental improvement,” Carmalt said. “We are working towards 24/7 availability which will help reduce costs and deliver high transparency for these types of payments.” In Asia, he noted, the programme has been prioritised and the bank is working on its roadmap. Managing fragmentation and orchestrating simplicity for clients Carmalt expects the global payment landscape to “remain complex” because “there’s no single global payment system” and the issues are “not so much about technology but more about different regulations, different standards and the need for rulebook harmonisation.” He cited Project Nexus, which is bringing together five real-time payment systems in Asia but “takes time to synchronise,” as an example of the challenge. He said banks must “make the complex simple for our customers,” managing multiple payment rails so clients “don’t have to manage the complexity.” For example, many clients use Bank of America for US dollar clearing and “don’t want to build brand new technology to get access to cross-border real time,” so the bank support the capability in a way that is easy to add on for existing clearing clients. Simplifying cross-border payments for clients Carmalt’s remarks show how Bank of America is positioning itself to meet client demand for speed, transparency and cost efficiency in cross-border payments. By combining Swift GPI transparency, Auto FX and Guaranteed FX Rates, with plans for 24/7 real-time international payments and participation in Swift’s shared digital ledger initiative, the bank aims to make complex global payment infrastructures simpler and more predictable for its Asia Pacific clients.
