Swift Pushes Old Payment Rails Into Blockchain Future

In business, achieving clarity often accelerates action and progress, which is more valuable than simply moving fast.

For much of global trade’s history, the speed of clarity has been more like a fragmented crawl.

What’s been missing is a common language.

Different clearing systems, legacy correspondent banking chains, and a patchwork of regulatory regimes have meant that a seemingly simple transfer, whether retail or wholesale (B2B), could take days to settle. Fees were opaque, tracking was cumbersome, and data attached to payments was often truncated or lost.

However, financial messaging network Swift, the century-old backbone of global payments, announced Monday (Sept. 29) that it is piloting a new blockchain-based network for cross-border payments with 30 banks. The announcement highlights that a growing emphasis on data richness and intelligibility across the marketplace is beginning to alter the economics and effectiveness of cross-border payments.

Swift’s blockchain-based shared ledger focuses on streamlining real-time, 24/7 cross-border payments. Many, if not all, of the program’s partner financial institutions are also focused on accelerating the transition to ISO 20022 standards. The goal of ISO 20022 is to expand the quality and completeness of data carried in payment messages and ensure that data can be consistently interpreted in every jurisdiction.

For business leaders, the rise of rich, intelligible payment data is not merely an operational matter. It can affect decisions on treasury centralization, supplier onboarding and platform partnerships.

Taken together, the marketplace’s ongoing shifts may herald not only faster cross-border clearing but also real-time fraud detection, smoother sanctions screening and automated regulatory reporting.

Read also: How the Consumerization of X-Border Payments Is Reshaping Corporate Treasury

The Rise of Data Richness as a Competitive Differentiator

In the last decade, the global payments ecosystem has been reshaped by a convergence of technology, regulation and rising customer expectations. Perhaps the most consequential, and least glamorous, shift has been in how payment data is structured, transmitted and interpreted across borders.

A central culprit of cross-border friction in payments was the limited capacity of message formats that were designed decades ago, in an era of telex-based communication, and carried only the minimal data needed to instruct a transfer, like sender, receiver, amount and a few free-form fields. In today’s world of real-time compliance screening, anti-money-laundering (AML) obligations and automated reconciliation, such data constraints create bottlenecks.

The accelerating adoption of the ISO 20022 global messaging standard has been a watershed moment. Its XML-based schemas allow more granular data to travel with each payment, replacing free-text fields with structured, machine-readable elements. For businesses, that means invoices can be matched automatically to incoming payments. For banks and regulators, it means real-time screening and monitoring are more reliable.

The story of cross-border payments over the next decade may be as much about data as about money. By embedding richness and intelligibility into the very fabric of payment messaging, the industry is tackling root causes of cost and delay that have long plagued international commerce.

“We’re going to a new environment where settlement is going to be instantaneous,” Sebastian Sintes, director of transactional FX at Bank of America, told PYMNTS Sept. 8 about the transition to ISO 20022. “The quality of the information is going to become even more important because it’s going to be harder to make adjustments. We expect to see an increase in the speed and volume of payment activity, while at the same time hopefully seeing a reduction in errors and risk … that was a trade-off before. Now, we’re in an environment where that hopefully is not going to be [so].”

The question will be more around how treasurers capture, store and manage data across its lifecycle, he added, noting that structured data is foundational to effective integration of artificial intelligence tooling and innovation.

See also: Why Time to Cash Is New Benchmark for Cross-Border B2B Growth

The Ripple Effects on Payment Economics

Data richness refers to the breadth, depth and quality of information accompanying each payment instruction. This includes structured fields for ultimate originators and beneficiaries, detailed remittance data, purpose codes and standardized identifiers like legal entity identifiers (LEIs).

Still, rich data is only as useful as the weakest link in the chain. If a supplier’s system truncates remittance information, the benefits of downstream automation can be lost.

Rich data alone does not guarantee better outcomes. For it to be useful, all participants, including banks, corporates, payment service providers and regulators, must interpret it the same way.

When richer data arrives in a consistent format, intermediaries can process it with fewer manual interventions. That can enable things like faster crediting of funds and more predictable delivery windows. Some corridors that once took two to three days are now approaching same-day settlement, while transparency has improved as well, as tracking tools modeled on parcel-shipping interfaces can give treasurers real-time visibility into payment status.

Separately, financial institutions have traditionally spent heavily on manual checks and remediation for incomplete or ambiguous data. Automating these processes with rich, structured information can help lower operational risk and compliance overhead, a benefit that may be especially valued in high-risk corridors.

Register for the upcoming B2B PYMNTS 2025 event, “B2B.AI: The Architecture of Intelligent Money Movement,” taking place Oct. 6 to 31.

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