Swift to build blockchain-based global payments infrastructure

Swift has unveiled plans to create blockchain-based infrastructure to facilitate global instant payments, in a move to build “parallel tracks” alongside its existing payment messaging infrastructure.

The organisation said today (September 29) that it would work with a group of more than 30 financial institutions to design and build the ledger. Swift said the aim was to enable real-time 24/7 cross-border payments, starting with a prototype developed by blockchain software firm Consensys.

“It is envisaged that the ledger – a secure, real-time log of transactions between financial institutions – will record, sequence and validate transactions and enforce rules through smart contracts,” Swift said in a statement. It described the ledger as a “pivotal step for global finance” that could enable instant payments across borders “at unprecedented scale”.

Swift chief executive Javier Pérez-Tasso announced the proposed ledger at the network’s annual conference, Sibos, which opened today in Frankfurt. “We provide powerful and effective rails today and are moving at a rapid pace with our community to create the infrastructure stack of the future,” he said.

Financial institutions from 16 countries have signed up to provide input on the design of the ledger. The list includes some of the world’s largest banks, such as JP Morgan, Citi and HSBC. The geographic spread is also wide, from South Africa’s Absa to Mexico’s Banorte and South Korea’s Shinhan Bank.

Swift said the ledger would extend its financial communication role “into a digital environment” to facilitate the exchange of tokenised assets. It added that it would be up to commercial and central banks to choose the types of tokens that would be exchanged on the ledger. “Swift will work with them on how to complement and make use of this new infrastructure,” it said.

Swift’s standard payment messaging network handles high volumes worldwide. Speaking to Central Banking earlier this year, Nick Kerigan, the organisation’s managing director and head of innovation, said it processed the equivalent of global GDP every two to three days.

Swift, which counts more than 11,500 financial institutions as members, has been developing infrastructure to support the exchange of digital assets for several years. It won Central Banking’s 2025 Partner initiative award for systems designed to allow the interchange of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and other tokenised assets.

In the second phase of that project, CBDCs and tokenised assets were traded around the world, with the central banks of Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand participating.

Today, Swift said it would “roll out client solutions” that would “orchestrate between” different systems, whether based on public or private blockchains or built around standard, centralised ledgers.