An introduction to the SWIFT Society By OpenSwiftCodes.com The unofficial SWIFT codes search engine 2013

What is the SWIFT society? The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a co-operative that manages a network that enables banks worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions SWIFT headquarters / picture source: Forbes.com crediting Arbello

Why is the SWIFT important? SWIFT provides software and network services to banks and Business Identifier Codes (BICs) are popularly known as "SWIFT codes". BIC or SWIFT codes that are required to route international transfers between banks. If you have ever ordered an international wire transfer, it has probably run through the SWIFT network.

The SWIFT in numbers 10 G- 10 central banks presided by the National Bank of Belgium 20 offices world-wide 25 Board members' country representatives 209 countries connected by the network 2,300 shareholding members 9,300 banks, financial services, broker-dealers, securities depositories, etc.

History of the SWIFT 1950 International banking transactions based on paper-based clerical handling procedures 1960 Competing computerised systems to exchange of messages between banks and countries 1973 Foundation of SWIFT by 239 banks from 15 countries 1977 SWIFT launched its messaging system and membership more than doubled to 518 banks 1980 De-facto messaging service for the global banking industry 1987 opened up to non-bank financial institutions such as securities firms, fund managers and since 2000 opened up to banks' corporate customers 2013 9,300+ users in 209 countries. Customers exchange more than 15 million messages daily

The network architecture SWIFT messages consist of five blocks of data including three headers, message content, and a trailer. SWIFT provides a transaction management with a centralized store-and- forward mechanism. Banks send messages formatted with SWIFT standards and sends it to SWIFT network. SWIFT guarantees its secure and reliable delivery.

How big is the SWIFT network? 9,000+ banks and financial houses, securities institutions and corporate customers in 210 countries 20 offices in the world's major financial markets Headquarter in La Hulpe, near Brussels, Belgium

A world-wide reach

What is a BIC code? The first 4 characters are the code of the bank, in the example HSBC for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. The next 2 characters are the code of the country, in the example US for the United States. The next 2 characters are the location 33. SWIFT codes are made of blocks of numbers with this structure of characters: BBBBCCLL. This is an example of the SWIFT code of the HSBC bank in the US

Criticism to the SWIFT network Opaque The administration of the network and the BIC codes themselves are not open despite being presided by national banks Expensive Some Forex transfer services use the ABA/ACH routing system because it's cheaper

Copyright and licensing terms This presentation is based on a work “SWIFT in numbers” at OpenSwiftCodes.com Copyright and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.