SWIFT

For other uses, see Swift (disambiguation).

S.W.I.F.T. SC
Company typeCooperative society[1]
IndustryTelecommunications
Founded3 May 1973; 51 years ago (1973-05-03)
HeadquartersLa Hulpe, Belgium
50°44′04″N 4°28′43″E / 50.73444°N 4.47861°E / 50.73444; 4.47861
Key people
  • Javier Perez-Tasso (CEO)
  • Graeme Munro (Board Chair)
ProductsFinancial telecommunication
Number of employees
>3,000
Websitewww.swift.com Edit this at Wikidata
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The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift), legally S.W.I.F.T. SC, is a cooperative established in 1973 in Belgium (French: Société Coopérative) and owned by the banks and other member firms that use its service. SWIFT provides the main messaging network through which international payments are initiated.[2] It also sells software and services to financial institutions, mostly for use on its proprietary "SWIFTNet", and assigns ISO 9362 Business Identifier Codes (BICs), popularly known as "Swift codes".

As of 2018, around half of all high-value cross-border payments worldwide used the Swift network,[3] and in 2015, Swift linked more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, who were exchanging an average of over 32 million messages per day (compared to an average of 2.4 million daily messages in 1995).[4]

Swift is headquartered in La Hulpe near Brussels. It hosts an annual conference, called Sibos, specifically aimed at the financial services industry.

  1. ^ "CBE Public Search". kbopub.economie.fgov.be. FPS Economy, SMEs, Self-Employed and Energy. Retrieved 27 February 2022.
  2. ^ Scott, Susan V.; Zachariadis, Markos (2014). The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) : cooperative governance for network innovation, standards, and community. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 1, 35. doi:10.4324/9781315849324. ISBN 978-1-317-90952-1. OCLC 862930816.
  3. ^ Arnold, Martin (6 June 2018). "Ripple and Swift slug it out over cross-border payments". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 27 September 2019. Retrieved 28 October 2019.
  4. ^ "Swift Company Information". SWIFT. 9 March 2010. Archived from the original on 22 December 2008. Retrieved 7 December 2016.