News Team update

Q3 2021 Mission Update: Speed

Amy Dicketts

19.10.21 (updated more than 1 year ago)

Read time 2 minutes

Speed

For the first time we've hit 40% instant transfers this quarter!

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A few things have driven these improvements.

8% more transfers to Asia are instant, largely driven by the improvements to IDR and THB that we worked on last quarter.

4% more transfers from North America are also instant, thanks to improvements we've made to the risk model we use to determine which direct debit payments we can speed up.

Finally, 7% more transfers from Australia are instant, now that we've integrated with a partner bank on the NPP network (Australia's instant payment rails).

All of these initiatives are large projects which take a while to return impact. This is because we've been on the journey towards instant for a while and all of the quick wins (no pun intended!) have already been delivered.

With that in mind, we wanted to share where we've been investing time in Q3 to deliver some big speed improvements which you'll start to see in Q4:

Improving the speed of our financial crime checks

All transfers are subject to various checks in order to prevent financial crime and keep your money safe. We were struggling to perform these checks at scale, which meant we saw delays when transfer volumes were high. In Q3, we worked on improving the efficiency of algorithms used to prevent financial crime, meaning we're able to check more transfers in under twenty seconds. This has reduced the amount of instant failures from 8% at its peak to 0.77%.

This will also allow us to speed up batch transfers. Previously, we weren't able to offer instant speeds on batched transfers because we couldn't process large amounts of transfers reliably in under 20 seconds. Now our processing speed is faster, these batches shouldn't cause delays. In Q4, if you're sending batched transfers on instant routes you'll be able to do this instantly.

Delivering instant transfers to Brazil

We continued to work on our integration with our banking partner in Brazil to give us access to their instant payment network, PIX.

We successfully ran our first test transfers at the end of the quarter and will start rolling this out to customers in October. This will mean transfers from countries like the UK and US to Brazil will be instant. Overall this should mean 3% more transfers are instant by the end of Q4.

Accuracy

Overall accuracy improved from Q2 to Q3. 80% of transfers are now on time, compared with 76% in Q2. This was driven by a reduction in early transfers, specifically from Europe.

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However, the percentage of late transfers increased in Q3. This was largely caused by payout partners failing to process transfers in under 20 seconds in Asia. We saw this happening a lot in India, due to a new API we introduced with one of our payout partners. We reverted this change in September, and the number of instant transfers getting delayed has reduced from 30,000 to 3,000 per week.

It's not all bad news though - as mentioned in our Q2 update we worked on our technical integration with our partner in Thailand and we can see that payout partner delays here have decreased month on month, so we're confident we can replicate this success in other regions.

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