The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ( SWIFT ) provides a network that enables
financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment. SWIFT also sells
software and services to financial institutions, much of it for use on the SWIFTNet Network, and ISO 9362 . Business Identifier Codes (BICs, previously Bank Identifier Codes) are popularly known as "SWIFT codes".
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
Type
Cooperative Industry
Telecommunications Founded
1973; 46 years ago Headquarters
La Hulpe , Belgium Key people
Yawar Shah
(Chairman)
Gottfried Leibbrandt
(CEO) Products
Financial Telecommunication Number of employees
>2000 Website
www.swift
.com
The majority of international interbank messages use the SWIFT network. As of 2015, SWIFT linked more than 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories, who were exchanging an average of over 15 million messages per day (compared to an average of 2.4 million daily messages in 1995). [1] SWIFT transports financial messages in a highly secure way but does not hold accounts for its members and does not perform any form of clearing or settlement .
SWIFT does not facilitate funds transfer: rather, it sends
payment orders , which must be settled by correspondent accounts that the institutions have with each other. Each financial institution, to exchange banking transactions, must have a banking relationship by either being a bank or affiliating itself with one (or more) so as to enjoy those particular business features.
SWIFT is a cooperative society under Belgian law owned by its member financial institutions with offices around the world. SWIFT headquarters, designed by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura are in La Hulpe , Belgium, near Brussels . The chairman of SWIFT is Yawar Shah, [2] originally from Pakistan ,
[3] and its CEO is Gottfried Leibbrandt, originally from the
Netherlands . [4] SWIFT hosts an annual conference, called
Sibos , specifically aimed at the financial services industry.
History
Edit
SWIFT was founded in Brussels in 1973 under the leadership of its inaugural CEO, Carl Reuterskiöld (1973–1989), and was supported by 239 banks in fifteen countries. It started to establish common standards for financial transactions and a shared data processing system and worldwide communications network designed by Logica and developed by The Burroughs Corporation. [5] Fundamental operating procedures , rules for liability , etc., were established in 1975 and the first message was sent in 1977. SWIFT's first United States operating center was inaugurated by Governor John N. Dalton of Virginia in 1979. [6]
Standards
Edit
SWIFT has become the industry standard for syntax in financial messages. Messages formatted to SWIFT standards can be read by, and processed by, many well-known financial processing systems, whether or not the message traveled over the SWIFT network. SWIFT cooperates with international organizations for defining standards for message format and content. SWIFT is also Registration authority (RA) for the following ISO standards: [7]
ISO 9362 : 1994 Banking—Banking telecommunication messages—Bank identifier codes
ISO 10383 : 2003 Securities and related financial instruments—Codes for exchanges and market identification (MIC)
ISO 13616 : 2003 IBAN Registry
ISO 15022 : 1999 Securities—Scheme for messages (Data Field Dictionary) (replaces ISO 7775)
ISO 20022 -1: 2004 and ISO 20022-2:2007 Financial services—Universal Financial Industry message scheme
In RFC 3615 urn:swift : was defined as Uniform Resource Names (URNs) for SWIFT FIN. [8]
Operations centers
Edit
The SWIFT secure messaging network is run from three data centers , one in the United States , one in the Netherlands and one in a secret location known only by a restricted number of employees for security reasons. These centers share information in near real-time . In case of a failure in one of the data centers, the other is able to handle the traffic of the complete network. SWIFT uses submarine communications cables to transmit its data. [9]
SWIFT opened the fourth data center in Switzerland , which started operating in 2009. [10] Since then, data from European SWIFT members are no longer mirrored to the U.S. data center. The distributed architectur
