Wednesday, 16 October 2024
Global banks to trial digital asset transactions on Swift in 2025
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.
Earlier this month, Swift was named as a participant in Project Agorá, a Bank for International Settlements-led project exploring the integration of tokenised commercial bank deposits and tokenised wholesale CBDCs on a unified platform.
Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer, Swift, said: "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. 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."
Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker
