Outside Russia from the Swift, that is, from the international system of transactions. After the invasion of Ukraine announced by Vladimir Putin and the start of the war, the financial measure of exclusion from the Swift stands out among the sanctions invoked against Moscow. Ukraine is clamoring for this, supported by several countries. The topic is at the center of discussions.
Swift, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the crucial system for exchanging financial transactions worldwide. With the Russian aggression on Ukraine in recent days Swift has been at the center of the debate with the hypothesis that snakes in these hours of being able to exclude Russia from the financial circuit as the maximum sanction after the invasion.
The service provider, headquartered in Belgium which was created in 1973, handles the essentials of payment orders and brings together over 11,000 financial and banking organizations in over 200 countries. In 2021, Swift recorded an average of 42 million messages per day. Traffic grew by 11.4% compared to the same period of the previous year.
In Italy, Swift is one of the two managers of telematic infrastructures within the ‘System for the telematic transmission of data’ (the so-called National Interbank Network). Although Swift is not a payment or settlement system or a bank, the operation of a large number of systemically important infrastructures, markets and banks depends on Swift. For this reason, the Central Banks have adopted a cooperative surveillance model which assigns the coordination role to the National Bank of Belgium.