News

This year’s Swift Hackathon saw teams from around the world sharing new ideas to explore how standards can accelerate the adoption of digital assets.

As customer expectations continue to rise and financial services become increasingly digital, Swift at Sibos will explore how institutions can deliver better outcomes while maintaining the trust on which global finance depends.

Rich, structured data is fundamental to the future of cross-border payments, enabling greater automation, more effective compliance screening and improved transparency and services for end customers. Swift is strongly committed to ISO 20022 as the foundation for that future and is supporting the industry throughout its multi-year migration journey.

More than 98% of payment instructions are now sent in the ISO 20022 format, following the transition from the MT standard last year, putting the industry in a strong position as it moves forward.

Consumers in some of the world's busiest remittance corridors are already benefiting from faster, more transparent and more predictable international payments, enabled by Swift's new framework for retail payments.

New Swift research shows where cross-border payments slow down at the last mile, and how the industry can address the factors affecting payment speed.

Nine months after Swift announced plans to add a blockchain-based ledger to its technology stack, here’s how the industry came together to make it happen.

As the African financial community gathers in Cape Town for Swift Connect Africa 2026, one message is clear: the region’s payments landscape is evolving rapidly, with a focus on shifting from ambition to execution.

As momentum builds across the community, preparations are under way for a critical milestone in November 2026. This milestone is pivotal to enabling rich, structured data and unlocking the full benefits of the ISO 20022 migration. After 14 November 2026, unstructured addresses will be removed. Only fully structured or hybrid postal addresses will be accepted.

As the global payments community continues its transition to ISO 20022, attention is now turning to the next priorities in the migration – including payment cancellations and exceptions and investigations (E&I). Learn what you need to do to prepare for this important milestone.

The migration to CBPR+ ISO 20022 for payment instructions is behind us – November 2025 was a huge milestone, and we saw a very successful end of coexistence where the community achieved a massive 97% adoption rate after the big weekend.

However, the story doesn’t end there, there is still a way to go with the rest of the CBPR+ roadmap.

Swift has successfully completed the design phase of its blockchain-based shared ledger, and is now actively building the first iteration that will enable interoperability between banks’ tokenised deposits to facilitate 24/7 cross-border payments.