SWIFT Partners Major FIs for Blockchain Interoperability Project
(6 September 2023 – Belgium) The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) has completed a highly anticipated blockchain interoperability pilot set to unlock tokenisation for financial institutions (FIs).
SWIFT has been working with FIs to prove that its infrastructure can facilitate the transfer of tokens across public and private blockchains. Interoperability is crucial to allowing the burgeoning digital asset market to scale. Given the existence of hundreds of blockchain networks, FIs would incur significant costs to tap into them, highlighting a key pain point which SWIFT’s pilot seeks to solve by creating a single point of access through which banks can tap into any public or private network.
The group’s new report Connecting Blockchains: Overcoming Fragmentation in Tokenised Assets revealed the initial feedback was that most institutions would prefer to evolve their existing infrastructures and applications, rather than having to build new infrastructure and technology stacks in order to access tokenized assets. SWIFT partnered BNY Mellon, Citi, BNP Paribas, ANZ, Lloyds and Euroclear on the project while also working with American clearing and settlement service provider DTCC and SIX Digital Exchange.
“For tokenisation to reach its potential, institutions will need to be able to seamlessly connect with the whole financial ecosystem. Our experiments have demonstrated clearly that existing secure and trusted Swift infrastructure can provide that central point of connectivity, removing a huge hurdle in the development of tokenisation and unlocking its potential,” commented SWIFT Chief Innovation Officer, Tom Zschach.
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