Today Swift said it will support banks in carrying out live pilots for digital assets and digital currencies from 2025. These include payments, FX, securities and trade transactions across multiple DLTs.
The aim is to support delivery versus payment (DvP) and FX payment versus payment (PvP) transactions. As Swift points out, it enables connectivity to 4 billino accounts across 200 territories.
“For digital assets and currencies to succeed on a global scale, it’s critical that they can seamlessly coexist with traditional forms of money. With Swift’s vast global reach we are uniquely positioned to bridge both emerging and established forms of value, and we’re now focused on demonstrating this in real-world, mainstream applications,” said Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer, Swift.
“As new forms of value emerge, our intention is to continue offering our community the ability to seamlessly make and track transactions of all kinds of assets – using the same secure and resilient infrastructure that is integral to their operations today.”
On the one hand, one objective of tokenization is to merge messages and the movement of money and assets. Today banks send messages, and the recipient banl separately takes action by moving the money. Sometimes there’s a delay in the recipient bank taking action, which is beyond Swift’s control. Hence, the merging of the two aspects is seen as desirable. Longer term, that could challenge the current role of Swift. But that role could evolve.
The original vision for digital assets involved a few extensive networks with many participants. Today’s reality is numerous smaller networks with the need for interoperability solutions. Many of these solutions make use of messaging. Ultimately, Swift Is already an interoperability network. Hence, one option is for banks to use the messaging network where they are already integrated.
Apart from running its multi CBDC connector and blockchain interoperability trials, Swift is also a participant in several other tokenization initiatives. These include the BIS Project Agorá that’s looking to upgrade correspondent banking using tokenization. Another is the Regulated Settlement Network in the United States.
Last month Swift outlined its strategy for digital assets and digital currencies. This includes potentially supporting the settlement of digital asset transactions using Swift messaging for payments. Along similar lines, the Eurosystem wholesale DLT settlement trials include two options that initiate conventional payments, with the third a wholesale CBDC.
