navigation search swift redirects here . for other uses see swift disambiguation . society for worldwide interbank financial telecommunication type cooperative industry telecommunications founded 1973 ; 43 years ago 1973 headquarters la hulpe belgium key people yawar shah chairman ; gottfried leibbrandt ceo products financial telecommunication number of employees 2000 website www.swift.com the society for worldwide interbank financial telecommunication swift provides a network that enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure standardized and reliable environment . swift also sells software and services to financial institutions much of it for use on the swiftnet network and iso 9362 . business identifier codes bics previously bank identifier codes are popularly known as swift codes . the majority of international interbank messages use the swift network . as of september 2010 update swift linked more than 9 000 financial institutions in 209 countries and territories who were exchanging an average of over 15 million messages per day compared to an average of 2.4 million daily messages in 1995 . 1 swift transports financial messages in a highly secure way but does not hold accounts for its members and does not perform any form of clearing or settlement . swift does not facilitate funds transfer rather it sends payment orders which must be settled by correspondent accounts that the institutions have with each other . each financial institution to exchange banking transactions must have a banking relationship by either being a bank or affiliating itself with one or more so as to enjoy those particular business features . swift is a cooperative society under belgian law owned by its member financial institutions with offices around the world . swift headquarters designed by ricardo bofill taller de arquitectura are in la hulpe belgium near brussels . the chairman of swift is yawar shah 2 originally from pakistan 3 and its ceo is gottfried leibbrandt originally from the netherlands . 4 swift hosts an annual conference every year called sibos specifically aimed at the financial services industry . contents 1 history 2 standards 3 operations centers 4 swiftnet network 4.1 architecture 4.2 swiftnet phase 2 5 products and interfaces 6 services 6.1 swiftref 6.2 swiftnet mail 7 u.s. government involvement 7.1 terrorist finance tracking program 7.2 sanctions against iran 7.3 u.s. control over transactions within the eu 7.4 monitoring by the nsa 8 use in sanctions 9 security 10 see also 11 references 12 external links history edit swift was founded in brussels in 1973 under the leadership of its inaugural ceo carl reuterski ld 1973 1983 and was supported by 239 banks in 15 countries . it started to establish common standards for financial transactions and a shared data processing system and worldwide communications network designed by logica . 5 fundamental operating procedures rules for liability etc. were established in 1975 and the first message was sent in 1977 . swift s first united states operating center was inaugurated by governor john n. dalton of virginia in 1979 . 6 standards edit swift has become the industry standard for syntax in financial messages . messages formatted to swift standards can be read by and processed by many well known financial processing systems whether or not the message traveled over the swift network . swift cooperates with international organizations for defining standards for message format and content . swift is also registration authority ra for the following iso standards 7 iso 9362 1994 banking banking telecommunication messages bank identifier codes iso 10383 2003 securities and related financial instruments codes for exchanges and market identification mic iso 13616 2003 iban registry iso 15022 1999 securities scheme for messages data field dictionary replaces iso 7775 iso 20022 1 2004 and iso 20022 2 2007 financial services universal financial industry message scheme in rfc 3615 urn swift was defined as uniform resource names urns for swift fin . 8 operations centers edit the swift secure messaging network is run from two redundant data centers one in the united states and one in the netherlands . these centers share information in near real time . in case of a failure in one of the data centers the other is able to handle the traffic of the complete network . swift opened a third data center in switzerland which started operating in 2009 . 9 since then data from european swift members are no longer mirrored to the u.s. data center . the distributed architecture partitions messaging into two messaging zones european and trans atlantic . 10 european zone messages are stored in the netherlands and in a part of the switzerland operating center ; trans atlantic zone messages are stored in the united states and in a part of the switzerland operating center that is segregated from the european zone messages . countries outside of europe were by default allocated to the trans atlantic zone but could choose to have their messages stored in the european zone . swiftnet network edit swift moved to its current ip network infrastructure known as swiftnet from 2001 to 2005 11 providing a total replacement of the previous x. 25 infrastructure . the process involved the development of new protocols that facilitate efficient messaging using existing and new message standards . the adopted technology chosen to develop the protocols was xml where it now provides a wrapper around all messages legacy or contemporary . the communication protocols can be broken down into interact swiftnet interact realtime swiftnet interact store and forward fileact swiftnet fileact realtime swiftnet fileact store and forward browse swiftnet browse architecture edit swift provides a centralized store and forward mechanism with some transaction management . for bank a to send a message to bank b with a copy or authorization with institution c it formats the message according to standard and securely sends it to swift . swift guarantees its secure and reliable delivery to b after the appropriate action by c. swift guarantees are based primarily on high redundancy of hardware software and people . swiftnet phase 2 edit during 2007 and 2008 the entire swift network migrated its infrastructure to a new protocol called swiftnet phase 2 . the main difference between phase 2 and the former arrangement is that phase 2 requires banks connecting to the network to use a relationship management application rma instead of the former bilateral key exchange bke system . according to swift s public information database on the subject rma software should eventually prove more secure and easier to keep up to date ; however converting to the rma system meant that thousands of banks around the world had to update their international payments systems to comply with the new standards . rma completely replaced bke on 1 january 2009 . products and interfaces edit swift means several things in the financial world a secure network for transmitting messages between financial institutions ; a set of syntax standards for financial messages for transmission over swiftnet or any other network a set of connection software and services allowing financial institutions to transmit messages over swift network . under 3 above swift provides turn key solutions for members consisting of linkage clients to facilitate connectivity to the swift network and cbts or computer based terminals which members use to manage the delivery and receipt of their messages . some of the more well known interfaces and cbts provided to their members are swiftnet link snl software which is installed on the swift customer s site and opens a connection to swiftnet . other applications can only communicate with swiftnet through the snl . alliance gateway sag software with interfaces e.g. raha remote access host adapter allowing other software products to use the snl to connect to swiftnet alliance webstation sab desktop interface for swift alliance gateway with several usage options administrative access to the sag direct connection swiftnet by the sag to administrate swift certificates so called browse connection to swiftnet also by sag to use additional services for example target2 alliance access saa is the main messaging software by swift which allows message creation only for fin messages but routing and monitoring for fin and mx messages . the main interfaces are fta files transfer automated not ftp and mqsa a websphere mq interface . the alliance workstation saw is the desktop software for administration monitoring and fin message creation . since alliance access is not yet capable of creating mx messages alliance messenger sam has to be used for this purpose . alliance web platform swp as new thin client desktop interface provided as an alternative to existing alliance webstation alliance workstation soon and alliance messenger . alliance integrator built on oracle s java caps which enables customer s back office applications to connect to alliance access or alliance entry . alliance lite2 is a secure and reliable cloud based way to connect to the swift network which is a lite version of alliance access specifically targeting customers with low volume of traffic . services edit there are four key areas that swift services fall under in the financial marketplace securities treasury & derivatives trade services and payments & cash management . securities swiftnet fix obsolete swiftnet data distribution swiftnet funds swiftnet accord for securities end of life october 2017 12 treasury & derivatives swiftnet accord for treasury end of life october 2017 12 swiftnet affirmations swiftnet cls third party service cash management swiftnet bulk payments swiftnet cash reporting swiftnet exceptions and investigations trade services swiftnet trade services utility swiftref edit swift ref the global payment reference data utility is swift s unique reference data service . swift ref sources data direct from data originators including central banks code issuers and banks making it easy for issuers and originators to maintain data regularly and thoroughly . swiftref constantly validates and cross checks data across the different data sets . 13 swiftnet mail edit swift offers a secure person to person messaging service swiftnet mail which went live on 16 may 2007 . 14 swift clients can configure their existing email infrastructure to pass email messages through the highly secure and reliable swiftnet network instead of the open internet . swiftnet mail is intended for the secure transfer of sensitive business documents such as invoices contracts and signatories and is designed to replace existing telex and courier services as well as the transmission of security sensitive data over the open internet . seven financial institutions including hsbc firstrand bank clearstream dnb nor nedbank and standard bank of south africa as well as swift piloted the service . 15 u.s. government involvement edit terrorist finance tracking program edit main article terrorist finance tracking program a series of articles published on 23 june 2006 in the new york times the wall street journal and the los angeles times revealed a program named the terrorist finance tracking program which the us treasury department central intelligence agency cia and other united states governmental agencies initiated after the 11 september attacks to gain access to the swift transaction database . 16 after the publication of these articles swift quickly came under pressure for compromising the data privacy of its customers by allowing governments to gain access to sensitive personal information . in september 2006 the belgian government declared that these swift dealings with american governmental authorities were a breach of belgian and european privacy laws . in response and to satisfy members concerns about privacy swift began a process of improving its architecture by implementing a distributed architecture with a two zone model for storing messages see operations centers . concurrently the european union negotiated an agreement with the united states government to permit the transfer of intra eu swift transaction information to the united states under certain circumstances . because of concerns about its potential contents the european parliament adopted a position statement in september 2009 demanding to see the full text of the agreement and asking that it be fully compliant with eu privacy legislation with oversight mechanisms emplaced