In Asia's first, DBS has launched a new feature enabling businesses to track cross-border payment collections in real-time.
More than 240,000 DBS corporate and SME clients in Singapore and Hong Kong will be the first to benefit from the service at no additional fee.
“The importance of enabling real-time tracking of cross-border payments and collections amid the landscape we operate in today cannot be underplayed as it helps businesses improve their working capital management and fosters trust with overseas counterparties," said Raof Latiff, Group Head of Digital for Institutional Banking, DBS Bank.
"This in turn helps improve supply chain efficiencies and encourages economic growth, enabling countries to bounce back faster from the pandemic."
Traditionally, the tracking of cross-border collections tends to be highly manual. Corporates 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, a process which is tedious, costly and time-consuming.
With the new DBS SWIFT gpi solution, all corporates need to do is to log into the bank’s online corporate banking portal, DBS IDEAL, to receive instant updates on where the incoming funds are in the cross-border payment chain.
With real-time visibility to incoming cash flows, businesses will be able to optimise their working capital management and utilise their cash more effectively. They can also fulfil 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.
Fashion e-commerce startup Zilingo, headquartered in Singapore, shared that the solution is particularly beneficial to their business. “With real-time tracking capabilities, we have full visibility on the status of incoming payments giving us greater certainty, enabling us to ship our fashion and lifestyle products out to our customers even faster and pay our suppliers quicker, delivering a transformed experience to all our partners in our ecosystem,” said Venkata Narayana D, Group Finance Director.
DBS targets to expand this offering to its other core markets, including China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam in the coming months.
