Q4 2023 Mission Update: Speed

Speed

In Q4, 61% of our transfers were instant, meaning they were completed in under 20 seconds. That’s an increase of 1% from Q3.

What's changed?

We’ve been working hard to increase our capability to screen transfers at scale, which has helped us process more transfers instantly. We’ve also improved our alerting so that when we see delays, we can respond to them quickly and fix any issues so that we’re back to our usual levels of instant performance sooner.

We've sped things up when sending money to LKR by improving our transfer routing logic so that any payments made to banks which support real-time payments are processed using our real-time payment rails. We’ve also escalated issues we were having with our partner bank, which they have since addressed, helping to improve our instant performance.

In AUD, we’re now able to make all domestic payments and some cross border payments ourselves thanks to our new direct integration with NPP going live. This means all same-currency transfers are instant (within 20 seconds), and some international transfers are paid out instantly. We're aiming for all international transfers to Australia to be paid out instantly by the end of September.

We saw more reliable performance from our partners when sending to IDR which increased the number of transfers successfully paid out instantly.

We also made it faster to send USD outside of the US by paying out SWIFT transfers more frequently. This means that 30% of transfers are now completed in under 6 hours, compared to 8.63% in the beginning of the year.

And finally, in THB, we improved the logic we use to determine how quickly we fund transfers. This allows us to have more money available to fund smaller transfers faster, which has meant that more transfers are successfully being sent instantly.

Accuracy

In Q4, 80% transfers arrived on time, which is our best performance in the last four quarters, and a 2% increase on last quarter.

Some of these improvements have come from reducing the screening delays. We also addressed the issue which was causing transfers to AUD to be delayed in Q3, partly thanks to moving over to our direct integration for payouts.

In December 2023, we also saw a significant reduction in pay-in delays for pay-ins made using manual bank transfer in NZD. The reduction in delays was mostly driven by us adjusting our estimates for when we expect to receive the money, so we can provide a more accurate estimate for customers.

One issue we have found is that funding transfers from balance, which should always be instant, is now sometimes taking a minute or two. We're looking into why this is and how we can fix the issue.