Open letter to SWIFT

Dear SWIFT,

As a bank customer, I congratulate you on decades of smooth, high quality service. However, as a global body whose mission is to deliver funds between banks safely, the last few months have been, with respect, challenging.

Recent incidents in Bangladesh and elsewhere have damaged your credentials immensely. Your initial defence, that the breaches were largely the banks’ responsibilities, was quite remarkable. We’ve all thoroughly understood that the strength of the network is no greater than the strength of the weakest link. We just wish you had understood that before the rest of us.

Blockchain to replace Swift?

It is interesting to compare the agendas of current annual events with those of one year earlier. For instance, in April 2014, Swift’s London Business Forum had no mention of bitcoin or blockchain. Roll forward one year and it was standing room only for its ‘What is the Future of Money?’ session with speakers from an array of companies that probably no one had heard of twelve months earlier (in part because some of them weren’t around then): Coinstructors, NXT 2 Pay, Innovate Finance, COLU and Epiphyte.

Sibos: final thoughts

Boston. Sibos: final thoughts

The carnival is over and the industry is moving on. Here are our final thoughts on this year's Sibos event before it fades from the memory.

Sibos: day four round-up

Bill Gates @sibos

Sibos 2014 closed with a keynote speech from Bill Gates, who famously branded banks 'dinosaurs' 20 years ago. There were also concluding comments and reviews of the week from the various forums and streams.

Here are the highlights from day four.

Sibos: day three round-up

Innotribe

Sibos entered its third day with the introduction of new forums, a focus on real-time payments and the conclusion of the annual Innotribe start-up challenge.

Sibos: day two round-up

@Swift

Day two of Sibos continued the theme of collaboration, with more focus on standards, market infrastructures and new technologies under the spotlight.

Sibos: day one round-up

@Swift

Sibos 2014 kicked off in Boston with the focus inevitably on regulation, standards and the build-up to the much anticipated plenary which revealed Swift's pricing strategy.

Sibos 2014: what to expect in Boston

With one month to go until thousands of delegates converge on Boston for the annual Sibos event, we give you the run-down on what trends and topics to expect during the conference. 

KYC: too many cooks?

At the best of times banks are reluctant to share ideas and information with each other, but it is clear that in some cases there is no discernable advantage to differentiate. KYC, for instance, is one of them, as I discussed during this piece in the IBS Journal in May. Today’s news that Swift has added six major banks to its KYC service, launched earlier this year, raises the question once again: Why does the industry have so many KYC utilities?

Swift, a political lever?

One man's KYC regime is another man's foreign policy. Indeed, it seems to be the US's main weapon at present: the sanctions against Russian individuals and companies which were expanded by the EU and US in the last week of April have echoes of an earlier controversy about whether Iranian banks should have been expelled by Swift in 2012.