Global banks to use Swift for trialling live digital asset transactions from 2025
Technology and Innovation,
3 October 2024 | 4 min read
- Banks across North America, Europe and Asia will use Swift connectivity to conduct live trials of digital asset and currency transactions as innovation accelerates from experimental phase to real-world application
- The trials follow groundbreaking collaborative work with dozens of financial institutions that have demonstrated Swift’s ability to connect multiple digital networks, technologies and asset classes
Brussels, 3 October 2024 — Central and commercial banks will be able to use the Swift network to carry out trial transactions of digital currencies and assets, in expansive pilots that seek to demonstrate the cooperative’s ability to facilitate the flow of all kinds of value between more than four billion accounts across 200 countries and territories.
Swift has already successfully demonstrated that it can transfer tokenised value across public and private blockchains, interlink central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) globally, and integrate multiple digital asset and cash networks.
The new trials will explore how Swift can provide its community of financial institutions with a single window of access to multiple digital asset classes and currencies – paving the way for their seamless integration into the wider financial system. Initial use cases will focus on payments, FX, securities, and trade, to enable multi-ledger Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) and Payment-versus-Payment (PvP) transactions.
Latest industry figures show that 134 countries are currently exploring CBDCs , and the tokenised asset market is projected to reach $16 trillion by 2030 . But the rapid growth of unconnected platforms and technologies has led to an increasingly fragmented landscape, creating a complex web of 'digital islands’ that presents a significant barrier to global adoption.
Swift’s trials will leverage its unique position at the heart of the financial system to interlink these disparate networks with each other as well as with existing fiat currencies, enabling its global community to seamlessly transact using digital assets and currencies alongside traditional forms of value, using their existing infrastructure.