SWIFT

SWIFT was founded in 1973 in Belgium, near Brussels. The initiators were 248 banks from 19 developed countries. They wanted to standardize financial transactions to make it easier for banks to operate across countries.

The organization itself is a cooperative community and operates within the framework of international and Belgian laws. Today it includes more than 11,000 financial institutions from more than 200 countries of the world. On average, about 30,000,000 messages are sent per day.

Two types of messages are transmitted in SWIFT: financial and system. Financial messages operate between users of the system - banks and financial institutions. System messages are transmitted from the user to the system or vice versa.

All messages in SWIFT consist of three parts: title, message body and trailer. After the message is sent, it is encrypted and given a specific number. If the message was composed correctly and passed the check, then it is sent to the recipient, and if not, it is returned to the sender.

SWIFT plans to conduct a series of asset tokenization experiments in the first quarter of 2022. The main goal is to explore ways to provide services in the token market.

“As interest increases, SWIFT is exploring how it can enable and improve interoperability between participants and systems during the transactional lifecycle of tokenized assets. To this end, SWIFT plans a series of experiments in Q1 2022 leveraging its trusted role as a central platform to explore the issuance, delivery versus payment (DVP), and redemption processes, to support a frictionless and seamless tokenized asset market. These experiments will use both established forms of payment and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).”