Swift Pilots Pay-by-Alias System to Simplify International Transfers

Swift is teaming up with financial institutions, payment service providers, and technology vendors on four continents to make international money transfers work more like domestic mobile payments.

The initiative will bring the front-end user experience of domestic schemes like Bizum (Spain), PayID (Australia), and Pix (Brazil) to international transactions. In these systems, users send money using proxy identifiers — mobile phone numbers, email addresses, or virtual payment addresses — instead of sharing bank account numbers.

Swift's approach involves securely matching aliases stored in domestic payment systems to enable cross-border transactions over its network. The company aims to replicate the simplicity of domestic alias payments for international use cases.

The pay-by-alias project represents the next stage of Swift's consumer payments scheme, which launched in June and now includes more than 100 banks.

We're on a mission to make sending money abroad as simple as sending it at home. Together with our community, we have already transformed how quickly and predictably international payments move. Now we're going further — innovating with our community to remove complexity at the very first click, so people can send money abroad with greater confidence.

Juan Martinez, managing director of Swift's Payments Platform, said the initiative builds on the network's existing work to improve speed and predictability in cross-border transfers.

The pilot involves a diverse group of financial organisations spanning multiple regions:

• Australian Payments Plus (AP+)
• Banco de Crédito del Perú
• Banorte
• BBVA
• Bizum
• Bradesco
• Caixabank
• Citizens Bank
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia
• DBS
• IDFC FIRST Bank
• Ouribank
• TerraPay
• Veritran

Raouf Soussi, global head of BBVA International Solutions, emphasised the importance of industry collaboration in removing friction from international payments.

Our ambition is simple: international payments should feel as easy and intuitive as domestic payments. Achieving that requires the industry to work together, connecting infrastructures and removing complexity for customers. We are pleased to participate in Swift's initiative and contribute to exploring new ways of making cross-border payments simpler, faster and more accessible.