SWIFT is a network that links all the world's major banks and is used for international payments. If you transfer money from your account in the Uk to an account in a foreign country there is a 90% chance the funds will be transferred over SWIFT.
SWIFT was started in 1979 by a consortium of European banks in response to the perceived threat of the American banks offering high tech payments services; a group of banks felt that Europe needed an answer that was equally as innovative and the idea of SWIFT was born. SWIFT stands for The Society for Worldwide Financial Telecommunication.
There are two parts to the SWIFT story, the standards and the network.
The standards story is the success that SWIFT has had in providing a set of messages that contain fields which in turn contain the data needed to effect a number of international banking transactions from payments, foreign exchange, securities, trade finance and account management. A direct result of what SWIFT has done is the explosion in the 80's and 90's of automation. This was not possible on an international scale before SWIFT as most communication was by telex, fax or post. What SWIFT did was to take a transaction (e.g. transfer of money) and do dissemble it to its basic components (Value date, Beneficiary account, Sender account, Currency, amount), tag these fields and promote that as a standard.
The second success that SWIFT has is the implementation of a world-wide network that links over 9,000 financial institutions around the world who use the network to exchange SWIFT messages to effect financial transactions. The SWIFT network is huge and is based around core data centres to which countries are connected using country-based hubs to which local financial institutions connect. SWIFT provides data encryption, non-repudiation and data validation as standard services.
SWIFT is a co-operative owned by all the users based upon transaction volumes. It is used primarily by banks but recently SWIFT have tried to expand into the corporate market and provide direct access to SWIFT instead of going through a bank. This is in response to the corporate treasurers requirement to have more control over their banking needs than before. Companies like Barron McCann are increasingly seeing a requirement for corporate treasurers to have direct access to SWIFT as they do for Bacs.
Barron McCann's Payment Gateway provides such access and it is transparent to the user. The treasury function generate payments and send them to Payments Gateway where they are forwarded automatically to the correct network (Bacs, SWIFT, CHAPS, Faster Payments, etc.).
To talk to Barron McCann about your SWIFT requirements or Payment Gateway, call 01462 482333
Barron McCann joins SWIFT Partner Programme
