SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It handles most of the international money and security transfers. Pretty much all worldwide financial institutions use it.
If you ever did send money across your border, you most likely used SWIFT. Now SWIFT is stepping its program up. In 2025, it introduces trials for digital transactions on Swift. So, let’s see what these digital transactions on Swift are all about.
Trial Digital Transactions on Swift
The trial digital transactions on Swift will start in 2025. This will include banks in Europe, Asia, and North America. This allows cryptocurrencies to integrate into global finance. SWIFT announced this news on 3rd October.
Exciting news! Starting next year, financial institutions from around the world will start trialling live digital asset and currency transactions on the Swift network.
This marks an important milestone in our journey to enable banks to transact interchangeably across both… pic.twitter.com/70BxOMoBpT
— Swift (@swiftcommunity) October 3, 2024
Furthermore, this also integrates crypto one more step into Traditional Finance. Use cases for this integration, are, among others:
- Payments
- Forex (foreign exchange)
- Securities
- Trade.
It also shows the interest from traditional banks for the digital financial sector. The financial sector keeps evolving, and banks want to keep up to date. However, SWIFT has not yet mentioned which digital assets this trial involves. This does open the door to plenty of speculation. It includes, for example, CBDCs and tokenized assets. For instance, SWIFT already announced a cooperation with Project Agorá in September. This project is well known for its work with CBDCs.
In 2022 SWIFT already partnered with Chainlink. Ever since experiments with Chainlink’s CCIP have been underway. For example, with:
- Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
- Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ).
- BNP Paribas.
- BNY Mellon.
- Citi.
- Clearstream.
- Euroclear.
- Lloyds Banking Group.
Swift Tokenized Assets Product Lead Thomas Dugauquier reflects on how the collaboration between Swift and Chainlink helped prove that existing infrastructure can merge with the new world of blockchains. pic.twitter.com/G9dP0phTHZ
— Chainlink (@chainlink) March 29, 2024
These are well-known and big financial market institutions. The CCIP is Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. The CCIP connects various blockchains with token transfers and messages. The picture below shows what Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer at Swift, has to say.
Some observers were rather critical about the timing of this news by SWIFT. The announcement comes one day after the SEC filed an appeal in its case against $XRP. This led to comments on X, stating that the SEC favors central bankers instead of retail.
In light of this news and the timing of the SEC repeal of the Ripple lawsuit yesterday you would believe the SEC works for the central bankers, not the American people. 🤔
— 💙Grapedrop (@RealGrapedrop) October 3, 2024
Conclusion
Digital transactions on SWIFT will start in 2025. SWIFT made this announcement on 3rd October. It opens the door even more for crypto’s integration into TradFi.
Disclaimer
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