Can Swift’s connectivity backbone for the old financial world be updated to suffice for the new one, too? With an overarching ambition to make itself a “single access point” for a range of public and private blockchain networks, and the exchange transactions between them, the organisation has now gathered a bunch of heavyweight friends to explore the case. DTCC, BNY Mellon, Clearstream and BNP Paribas are a few of the actors on the list.
A press release dated Tuesday lines out the initiative, where the connectivity solution will be provided by Chainlink, a “Web3” services platform.
The “more than a dozen major financial institutions and FMIs” that are taking part also include Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), Citi, Euroclear, Lloyds, an SIX Digital Exchange (SDX). Their experiments serve to further “test how firms can leverage their existing Swift infrastructure to efficiently instruct the transfer of tokenised value over a range of public and private blockchain networks”, on the back of alledgedly successful trials last year.
Readers interested in Swift’s DLT-related initiatives are advised to check out this article and session video from last week’s PostTrade 360° Oslo conference, where Rachel Levi, Global Head of Innovation Engineering, presented a parallel interoperability initiative around central bank digital currencies, CBDCs.