SWIFT GPI (Global Payments Innovation) is the service that turned international wires from a black box into a near-real-time tracked transaction. Launched in 2017, it now covers more than 95% of cross-border SWIFT payment value, and every major correspondent bank in the world is GPI-enabled.
The core mechanism is simple: every GPI payment carries a UETR — a 36-character UUIDv4 in field 121 — and every bank that touches the payment must confirm receipt and processing back to a central SWIFT tracker. The result is an end-to-end status trail accessible to the sender, the beneficiary, and any intermediary on the route.
There are four primary GPI status codes you will encounter: ACSC (accepted, settlement completed), ACSP (accepted, settlement in process), ACWP (accepted, pending with funds), and RJCT (rejected). The most useful is ACSC — it means the beneficiary bank has credited the account.
GPI also exposes the FX rate applied at each hop, the charges deducted (in field 71F), and the timestamp of each bank-leg event. This transparency is what enables refund disputes when a beneficiary received less than expected — you can see exactly which correspondent took the cut.
Banks that join GPI commit to an SLA: same-day settlement for at least 50% of payments, full transparency of fees, and unaltered remittance information. As of 2026, the top 100 GPI banks routinely hit 95%+ same-day for major-currency corridors (USD-EUR, EUR-GBP, USD-JPY).
For end users, the tracker is exposed in two ways: through your bank's own portal (every major bank has one) or through an independent gpi viewer like Ohmyfin, which fetches the same data directly from the SWIFT GPI network when you provide a UETR.
A common confusion is between GPI and instant payments. GPI is not instant — it is fast and tracked. True instant rails (FedNow in the US, SCT Inst in the EU, FPS in the UK) are different systems entirely and do not use SWIFT messaging.
GPI itself adds no extra fee for retail customers. The standard wire-transfer fee your bank charges already covers GPI participation. Ohmyfin provides public GPI lookup for free.
SWIFT retains GPI tracking data for 124 days. After that, only the banks themselves hold the records.
ACSP means the payment is somewhere in the chain but the next bank has not yet confirmed. Most commonly it is stuck in sanctions screening, in a manual review queue, or waiting for the next RTGS cycle.
Yes, but you will lose end-to-end tracking from the point the non-GPI bank enters the chain. Most major correspondents are GPI-enabled now, so this is increasingly rare.