What is SWIFT?

SWIFT is the abbreviation of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) which was established more than 35 years ago in Belgium with 239 banks in 15 countries participating since its inception. create. Currently, SWIFT has linked more than 11,000 financial institutions across 209 countries and territories.

This is an association whose members are banks and financial institutions. SWIFT helps banks around the world that are members of SWIFT to transfer money to each other or exchange information through a transaction code called SWIFT code. Members exchange information / transfer money to each other in the form of SWIFT messages, which are standardized messages in the form of data fields, symbols so that computers can recognize and automatically process transactions.

SWIFT is considered the backbone of the international financial transfer system.

Statistics show that more than 40 million messages with billions of USD transfer orders are sent every day through SWIFT making it the most important payment network in the world to date.

Due to the nature of controlling the world's money flow, the security of SWIFT is so high that hackers have to "give up" in attacking this system.

SWIFT is currently managed by the G10 central banks as well as the European Central Bank with coordination from the National Bank of Belgium.

Advantages of SWIFT

Banks around the world use the SWIFT system due to its outstanding advantages
:

1. This is a communication network used only in banking systems and financial
   institutions, so it is highly secure and safe.
2. The fast information transmission speed allows to process a large number of transactions.
   2
3. The cost of a transaction is low compared to Mail and Telex which are traditional means
   of communication.
4. Using SWIFT will follow a uniform standard around the world. This is the
   common point of any bank participating in SWIFT that can integrate into the banking community around the world.

Although SWIFT is one of the main means of international communication, it is not
the only one that still has to use other means of communication. In case of
transferring international payment documents to a bank in Myanmar, they still have to use mail but cannot
use SWIFT to transfer because that bank has not joined the SWIFT system. Or when
sending a telegram to the bank there, too, one still had to use the means of communication by mail.