(Yicai Global) June 27 -- The Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, China’s alternative to the SWIFT interbank clearing and settlement system, rolled out a new service based on its standard transceiver yesterday that makes global yuan transfers more efficient and transparent, Yicai Global learned.

The new service, dubbed Payment Lens, enables banks, non-banking financial institutions, and international payment firms to check on the progress of remittances 24 hours a day with instant updates. Some banks and companies are already using the service.

“Payment Lens helps customers to easily track the status of their payment process, effectively improves the speed and transparency of cross-border yuan payments, and further optimizes customer experience,” said an official at the Hong Kong branch of Bank of Communications.

China launched CIPS in October 2015. Last year, the Shanghai-based system processed about CNY80 trillion (USD12 trillion), an increase of 75 percent on the previous year.

The CIPS standard transceiver is a business processing and information messaging tool customized for cross-border yuan payments that was introduced to tackle the inconvenience of different payment instruction standards and manual processing links among direct and indirect participants and end-users. The tool, which has unified standards, can be used flexibly and easily expands to other functions.

An official at Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank said that based on Payment Lens the bank would “continue to improve and enrich cross-border payments and settlement systems, create various international payment services and products, and provide foreign trade firms in Kunshan with high-quality, quick, transparent, and traceable cross-border payment services.”

Editor: Futura Costaglione