SWIFT

What is SWIFT?

• The SWIFT system stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is a secure platform for financial institutions to exchange information about global monetary transactions such as money transfers.
  
  
• While SWIFT does not actually move money, it operates as a middleman to verify information of transactions by providing secure financial messaging services to more than 11,000 banks in over 200 countries.
  
  
• Based in Belgium, it is overseen by the central banks from eleven industrial countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, besides Belgium.
  
  

What does the move aim to achieve?

• Excluding Russian banks from the SWIFT platform is expected to hit the country’s economy hard.
  
  
• While workarounds to SWIFT have been tried, none have proven to be effective.
  
  
• During the last seven years, Russia, too, has worked on alternatives, including the SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) — an equivalent of the SWIFT financial transfer system developed by the Central Bank of Russia.