SWIFT (banking network)
More info
- Owner
- Member banks (cooperative)
- Released
- 1973
- Type
- Messaging network
The banks' global messaging network, which never moves a cent itself but tells everyone else where the money should go.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication was founded in Belgium in 1973 by a few hundred banks fed up with telex, where every payment was free text that someone had to interpret by hand. The network went live in 1977 and is still owned by its members, now more than 11,000 institutions in over 200 countries. The money itself travels through correspondent accounts and central bank systems; SWIFT only carries the instructions.
For half a century the lingua franca was MT, fixed-format text messages in which MT103 became shorthand for an international wire. Cross-border payments migrated to ISO 20022, with MT retired in November 2025. The network is also geopolitics: in 2016 forged SWIFT messages siphoned 81 million dollars out of Bangladesh's central bank, and in 2022 Russian banks were cut off as a sanction.