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SWIFT - How banks communicate with each other via SWIFT
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How banks communicate with each other via SWIFT?
The abbreviation SWIFT stands for “Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication”, an institution that regulates the information exchange among credit institutions – in more than 200 countries worldwide. Literally speaking, you could call SWIFT the “International Society for Telecommunication in the Financial Sector”.
SWIFT was founded in 1973 in Brussels. With SWIFT, the founding parties wanted to establish a central agency which was to control the information exchange among credit institutions by means of a functioning telecommunication network. SWIFT has its headquarters in La Hulpe, Belgium, from where it coordinates the information exchange among its members. Currently, more than 8,000 internationally active financial institutes are involved in SWIFT. Even brokers, investment companies and stock exchanges can become Swift members.
In order to cope with their data transfer, SWIFT has provided a data network that is commonly called SWIFT network.
In order to process the great amount of SWIFT data around the globe, there are additional operating centers – i.e. data processing centers – in the Netherlands and in the United States. A further SWIFT data processing center is to be built in Switzerland. The administration of SWIFT is present in 22 offices around the globe, among others in the US, in Australia, Japan, Great Britain, and France. SWIFT Germany has its headquarters in Frankfurt am Main.
In July 2009 alone, nearly 330 million messages from 209 countries worldwide were exchanged across the Swift network, representing an average of more than 14 million Swift messages per day. Among these Swift messages are e.g. messages about payment transactions, stock transactions, currency and money markets, but also administrative messages by the financial institutions that they exchange among themselves.
By means of these Swift messages, for example one financial institution may inform another bank that a transfer order has arrived for one of its customers. The amount of the transfer is to be debited at a defined date from a predefined account and then handed over to the beneficiary.
NB: Only messages are exchanged via Swift, no money transactions.
So the service is limited exclusively to transporting messages. In order to put this into practice and identify the recipient, a specific code is necessary, the so-called BIC code. BIC means Bank Identifier Code and can be seen as an analog to the German Bank Code. But since this BIC code is defined and standardized by swift, it is often simply called SWIFT code. The BIC code is an ISO standardized code – ISO being the International Organization for Standardization – allowing the unequivocal identification of each SWIFT member and participant worldwide.
