SWIFT entering the blockchain world

The first was the completion  of the mandatory migration to the  ISO 20022 payment standard. From that date ISO 20022 is now required for cross border payment instructions – creating opportunities for increased operational efficiency, innovation, and customer insights for financial institutions and market infrastructures worldwide.

At the same day, and even more important,  SWIFT also announced its intention to add a blockchain-based shared ledger to its infrastructure whereby the ISO 20022 message standard will also be used for digital assets. In the meantime SWIFT is working on various trials to further improve its infrastructure.

In this blog we will go into more detail what these initiatives may bring, show some interesting trials and how it will enable to bridge the gap between TradFi and DeFi.

SWIFT changeover to ISO 20022

On 22 November 2025, SWIFT completed its migration to the richer ISO 20022 standard. The main effect is significant: core cross-border payments will move to a single modern standard for the first time. ISO 20022 is now required for all financial-institution-to-financial-institution payment instructions. All SWIFT payment messages must be sent and will be exchanged in the richer ISO 20022 format. This is indicating a structural change in the global payments system.

• End of the coexistence period between MT and ISO 20022.

On the same day the coexistence period between the old MT (Message Type)  legacy messages and the new ISO 20022 format messages for cross-border payments and cash-reporting  between financial institutions that began in March 2023 has ended, marking the start of a new era of richer, more structured payments data.

MT messages under the old SWIFT standard, were mostly plain-text messages. There was no consistent structure, and every bank might format it differently. This made automation hard and compliance checks, like anti-money laundering or sanctions screening, slow and error-prone, in a digital world

With the coexistence period now ending, institutions that fail to migrate to the new ISO 20022 standard risk rejected messages, data loss, or costly translation processes.

• What ISO 20022 really Is 

ISO 20022 is not just a software upgrade. It’s more than a technical switch. It is the backbone of a data-rich, fully digital payments environment that global banks and market infrastructures have been preparing for years. ISO 20022 is a global  messaging standard that governs the format and content of financial-message traffic. The new standard reshapes how money talks, delivering structured, data-rich formats, clearer compliance, and automation potential that could redefine cross-border payments, similar to what modern software uses.

• What may ISO 20022 bring?

ISO 20022 would bring a number of important benefits for banks and payment systems. This new message standard is central to faster, more efficient and data-driven payments.

With ISO 20022, computers, can read and understand every part of a payment message automatically. Much richer structured data in each payment may improve automation, reconciliation, compliance screening and processing efficiency. That means faster processing, reducing costs and lower the likelihood of errors. Its API-driven integration offers enhanced compliance and transparency,  and robust encryption-based data security, financial-crime monitoring and better fraud detection, with regulations like AML and GDPR through enriched data.

It is also a technical foundation for interoperability to communicate between banks, market infrastructures and new rails like Digital Ledger Technology (DLT) platforms, using a consistent messaging framework for cross-border payments under CBPR, a program to harmonize the implementation of ISO 20022 messaging standards for cross-border transactions.

“The new (ISO 20022) standard will power our strategic initiative to create a payment scheme to guarantee a consistently fast, predictable and transparent experience for retail customers worldwide, and will also enable the foundations for our blockchain-based shared ledger, to allow the trusted movement of tokenised value, thereby bringing together TradFi and DeFi for a fully interoperable financial ecosystem of the future”. Jerome Piens, Chief Operations Officer at Swift

 

SWIFT launched blockchain-based shared ledger

Next to the introduction of ISO 20022,  SWIFT also announced its plans to integrate a permissioned blockchain-based shared ledger in its existing global payments  infrastructure, aiming to enable instant and optimal cross-border transactions, extending its trusted platform into a digital environment.  This is SWIFT’s  most ambitious blockchain experiment yet, that would act as a seamless bridge to tokenized real-world assets.

• Why SWIFT Is Racing to Blockchain?

This step to launch this shared ledger is actually strategic-oriented. SWIFT has been experimenting with distributed ledger technology including digital assets, over the last two years. They faced increasing pressure from the traditional payments who are dealing with the rise of stablecoins that are rapidly developing from niche crypto instruments into the mainstream and are increasingly accepted by traditional financial institutions. But also the upcoming of central bank digital currencies and other blockchain-based alternatives to traditional cross-border transfers, has resulted in newer payments networks and blockchain-based alternatives that were beginning to erode SWIFT’s dominance.

• Swift collaboration with a group of more than 30 financial institutions

In the last few months SWIFT has collaborated with a group of more than 30 financial institutions globally,  including  Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, Lloyds Bank, and others plus multiple financial market infrastructures providing feedback in the ledger’s design, a blockchain infrastructure for tokenized assets. These institutions collaborated with SWIFT to define functionality, governance, and future phases of development.

This blockchain-based shared ledger is based on the Linea initiative, an early strategic conceptual prototype developed by Ethereum developer ConsenSys that was further completed via numerous tests by the consortium.

• How the Shared Ledger Actually Works

The shared ledger –  a secure, real-time log of transactions between financial institutions –  is designed to handle regulated tokenised value using smart contracts.  The infrastructure of the shared ledger will further support any form of regulated tokenised assets – from digital currencies to tokenised securities – enabling a new generation of financial products.

The system combines payment messaging and settlement into one process, addressing the slow and expensive nature of current multi-intermediary systems. Payment transactions will be recorded and validated in real time. By using smart contracts, the ledger will automatically sequence, validate, and enforce rules for every transaction, thereby eliminating the delays inherent in traditional correspondent banking. Automated KYC/AML is thereby executed via on-chain rules and ISO 20022 data richness.

That will enable instant cross-border transactions for financial institutions using blockchain technology, delivering real time cross border payments for financial institutions

• Interoperability

The shared ledger also ensures interoperability, connecting with both existing fiat currency rails and emerging digital networks. The ledger is integrating ISO 20022-formatted data with blockchain-based networks, as a bridge  between traditional finance and decentralized systems, enabling interoperability between stablecoins, tokenized deposits, CBDCs and blockchain solutions like Ripple and Stellar

SWIFT emphasised that the shared ledger system is designed for full interoperability. That helps orchestrate transactions across both traditional and emerging systems, to ensure efficient and synchronised transactions for various use cases, while maintaining the core principles of  trust, resilience and compliance that are fundamental for  Swift and critical to the secure functioning of global finance.

“Interoperability is at the heart of everything we are doing at SWIFT to facilitate the seamless flow of value across the world in the face of increasing fragmentation. 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.” Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer at SWIFT

• SWIFT’s neutral position

This move to a shared ledger should be seen as an infrastructure play. SWIFT position itself as an infrastructure provider, not an arbiter of what can move across that infrastructure. SWIFT aims are to provide a secure and reliable infrastructure that enables trusted value transfer.

According to SWIFT the types of tokens that will be exchanged on the ledger are the territory of commercial and central banks. Crucially, Swift will work with them on how to complement and make use of this new infrastructure.

This common ledger is  aimed to coexist with SWIFT by offering regulated institutions a compliant, private, bank-controlled alternative that integrates with existing SWIFT rails and legacy systems. SWIFT thereby provides the messaging service ISO 20022 that financial institutions use to move money around the world. ISO 20022 is not a certification for cryptocurrencies or blockchains. It only defines the messaging structure between institutions, not the underlying assets or settlement rails.

With this in mind, the proposed ledger will complement Swift’s existing messaging infrastructure by facilitating banks and other regulated entities to transact the tokenised value across digital networks.

• What may the shared ledger bring for financial institutions?

Having migrated to ISO 20022, global banks are now positioned to accelerate blockchain adoption. It becomes technically much easier to connect traditional rails to DLT platforms. They are gaining near-instant access to new revenue streams through tokenised assets, and (where regulators allow) CBDC or stablecoin systems — because everyone shares a common messaging schema.

The primary focus is on a first use case that promises to make instant, always-on cross-border transactions possible at unprecedented scale, enabling real-time, secure, and transparent transaction tracking through automation. This permissioned shared ledger may settle regulated tokenised value transfers – including stablecoins and tokenized assets –  in real time, 24 hours a day/7 days a week. The promise of instant, always-on cross-border payments means greater operational efficiency for banks worldwide in terms of offering higher speed, transparency, and interoperability with future digital assets rails, leading to more efficient liquidity and treasury management, better cash flow visibility, and reduced working capital requirements.

Some SWIFT trials

This shared ledger should be seen as a secure and natural extension of SWIFT’s progressive ecosystem innovation. It is the result of various live trials of digital assets and currency transactions over the past few years, mainly focusing on standardisation and interoperability validating the clear value that these technologies bring to modernizing the financial system. Below follow the most interesting ones.

• SWIFT – Chainlink trials: shared standards and interoperability

Over more than seven years, SWIFT and Chainlink have collaborated across numerous initiatives, all with a common theme of facilitating seamless interoperability enabling financial institutions to connect to blockchain networks using their existing infrastructure and messaging standards.

As the industry-standard oracle platform, Chainlink provides the essential connectivity to chains, onchain standards, and services that institutions in the SWIFT ecosystem need to enact their plans for institutional tokenization, enabling complete interoperability between the source and destination blockchains. By defining shared standards and aligning with existing market infrastructure, SWIFT and Chainlink have given institutions a reliable way to participate in this new era of finance using the systems they already trust.

In 2025 SWIFT, Chainlink and 24 of the world’s largest financial institutions and market infrastructures, such as  DTCC, Euroclear, SIX and UBS, continued their work on a global corporate actions processing initiative using SWIFT ISO 20022 messages. This trail showed that SWIFT’s infrastructure can seamlessly facilitate the transfer of tokenised value across multiple public and private blockchains. SWIFT can provide a single point of entry to multiple networks for financial institutions to manage tokenized fund subscription and redemption workflows directly from their existing systems.

• SWIFT and Citi trial for settling digital payments

In November SWIFT and Citi have successfully completed a joint trial, demonstrating the feasibility of settling payments between fiat and digital currencies simultaneously, proving that fiat money can seamlessly convert to and settle with digital currencies. During the trial, Citi used USDC tokens (a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar) issued by Circle to simulate real-world, near-production conditions for the test.

The trial, conducted using SWIFT’s  existing infrastructure combined with blockchain-based tools (enhanced with blockchain connectors, orchestrators, and smart contracts), showed that traditional financial infrastructure can synchronize settlement across a fiat account and a digital-asset wallet. By integrating stablecoins into existing financial systems, Citi and Swift are helping to reduce the need for conversion.

This trial proves that traditional  financial systems can integrate blockchain technology while maintaining the security and reliability needed for large-scale, cross-currency payments.  It shows that digital currencies can be used in a way that is synchronized with traditional financial workflows, paving the way for more efficient and transparent transactions in the future.

Citi and SWIFT plan to further refine the payment system with broader participation from the financial community.  The next phase of the initiative will focus on improving interoperability and increasing the adoption of blockchain technology.

• Blockchain ISO aligned rails

SWIFT also has tested connections with several blockchain networks to explore cross-border transfers, CBDC payments, and asset tokenization. Any blockchain or platform that can speak the common ISO 20022 language is better positioned to interoperate with banks, RTGS systems and SWIFT flows.

Several blockchain projects are positioning themselves as ISO-aligned rails that can plug into this new environment. Ripple has been used for interbank settlements and CBDC payments. Its enterprise network can integrate with banks using the same messaging model, with XRP optionally used as a bridge asset. Stellar has demonstrated mappings of ISO 20022 payment messages to Stellar transactions, targeting low-cost cross-border transfers and stablecoins, while Algorand has been trialled for asset tokenization and digital bonds and institutional rails. Hedera is designed so that applications built on it can implement ISO 20022-compliant messaging for enterprise and government registries and QuantNet are pitched as ISO 20022-native interoperability layers, bridging traditional financial networks and multiple blockchains.

• Swift, HSBC and Ant International Trial

In December 2025 SWIFT, HSBC and Ant International have completed a successful Proof of Concept (POC) for the cross-border transfer of tokenised deposits using ISO 20022 standards  The initiative leverages SWIFT’s global messaging network and HSBC’s recently launched Tokenised Deposit Service, combined with Ant International’s blockchain technology.

In the test, Singapore-based Ant International and HSBC connected Ant’s blockchain infrastructure to SWIFT’s network, allowing real-time cross-border treasury management. This marked the first case leveraging the SWIFT network and ISO 20022 as a messaging standard in cross-border payments using tokenised deposits, allowing blockchain interoperability on SWIFT’s network  between digital money and traditional fiat money.

It unlocks the full benefits of tokenisation for enhanced liquidity, programmable finance, and 24/7 real-time settlement, enabling real-time treasury management across borders. Combining the transparency and efficiency of tokenisation with the scale and security of existing payments infrastructure, the integration with SWIFT’s network enhances the security and compliance of Ant International’s innovative blockchain-based solution.

This move could further streamline global blockchain-based payments and corporate treasury management.

Forward looking: bridging TradFi and DeFi

For financial institutions, SWIFT’s transition to ISO 20022 and the launch of the shared ledger are a major structural shift laying the foundation for  the future of digital transactions. With its transition to ISO 20022, that will create a more standardized environment for cross border payments and introduction of the shared ledger, SWIFT ‘s moves underscore that digital assets are becoming an important driver of global finance, bringing trusted tokenized assets much closer to the mainstream.

Through this initial shared ledger concept SWIFT is paving the way for financial institutions to take the payments experience to the next level with Swift’s proven and trusted platform at the centre of the industry’s digital transformation. By adding blockchain functionality it can evolve and still provide compliance and resilience features traditional banks require. This may accelerate the industry’s transition to digital finance around the world, further bringing together TradFi and DeFi  for a fully interoperable financial ecosystem of the future.