Exclusion from the Swift Interbank System - What is Swift?

Cheikh Mbacke SENE, Expert in Economic Intelligence, Monitoring -Economic analyst - PhD student in business administration (IAU, USA)

Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), is a platform, created in 1973 (to replace the aging Telex technology) and based in Brussels (Belgium), positioned as a reference tool for global finance and commercial transactions. It is a platform for the transit of payment orders between banks, bank customer funds transfer orders, purchase orders or even the sale of securities. The Swift platform has a standardized messaging system, allowing fast, confidential and inexpensive communication between financial institutions. It brings together more than 11,000 banking and securities organizations, market infrastructures and corporate clients in more than 200 countries and territories.

This sanction, which excludes many Russian banks, will have important consequences. Russia would be the second country after the United States in number of users with some 300 Russian banks and institutions members of the system (70% of the banking sector). More than half of Russian credit organizations are represented in Swift.

To thwart this sanction, Moscow has set up new financial infrastructures for payments, rating or transfers, via a system called SPFS.

However, it is important to know that this exclusion of the Swift interbank system introduces the world to a new conjuncture. To be continued