In 2025, the global financial community counted on Swift more than ever. We saw double-digit traffic growth and a new record of over 68 million messages exchanged in a single day.
It’s a trust we never take for granted, and why we are relentlessly focused on operational excellence and committed to working together to continuously raise the bar on the transaction experience. As a community we made strong progress across many fronts in 2025, taking big strides to embed rich data, accelerate payment speed, and embrace a dynamic future of digital finance.
Read on to discover some of the highlights.
1. Universal shift to ISO 20022 unlocks global payments innovation
On 22 November, the global financial community ushered in a new era for global payments with the universal adoption of ISO 20022 as the standard language for cross-border payments worldwide. Today, over 97% of messages over the Swift network are sent in the ISO 200222 format.
The move marks the end of coexistence with the traditional MT message format and sets a new foundation for cross-border innovation. The rich data standard will help elevate the customer experience in support of the G20 goals for international payments, enabling a faster, more efficient, transparent and data-driven experience, while at the same time setting the stage for seamless integration of digital forms of value.
Looking ahead, we’ll continue supporting the community to drive adoption and power the next generation of instant, interoperable and inclusive payments.
2. Payment scheme to bring retail experience to new level
In another bold next step toward making cross-border payments as seamless as domestic ones, we announced that we’re developing a new scheme to guarantee a consistently fast, predictable and transparent payment experience for consumers and small businesses sending money internationally.
Financial institutions will leverage the advanced capabilities on the Swift platform — typically used for wholesale payments — to enhance cross-border retail payments. Recent upgrades have significantly improved the experience, enabling fully transparent transfers that exceed G20 targets, with 75 percent of payments reaching beneficiary banks within 10 minutes. Initiatives like Swift Go and experience benchmarking have already benefited consumer channels, and the scheme will further extend the advantages to more than 4 billion accounts in over 200 countries and territories.
Together with over 30 banks, we’re developing a framework of rules that will provide retail customers with the peace of mind and predictability they expect – with no hidden fees, full value transfers and instant settlement where domestic infrastructure and regulations allow. We’ve begun collaboration to deliver an MVP scheme in H1 of 2026 – one that will lay the foundation for the transformation of end-to-end cross border retail payments.
3. Blockchain-based ledger to accelerate benefits of digital finance at global scale
In September, we announced groundbreaking plans to add a blockchain-based shared ledger to our technology infrastructure. Working with over 30 financial institutions globally, this landmark initiative will extend Swift’s trusted platform into a digital environment, unlocking the potential for always-on transactions at global scale and accelerating the industry’s transition to digital finance. Since that announcement, we’ve kicked off the design phase – delivering steady momentum and real progress towards our initial use case of enabling 24/7 cross border payments.
As Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso said at Sibos, “We provide powerful and effective rails today and are moving at a rapid pace with our community to create the infrastructure stack of the future. Through this initial ledger concept we are 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.”
4. Supporting improvements all the way through the last mile
On average, 80% of a cross-border payment’s journey time takes place after the payment leaves the Swift network, according to our latest ‘Spotlight on Speed’ research. And tackling these last mile frictions is crucial toward achieving the G20 goals for an enhanced international payments experience.
In 2025, we focused on gaining an in-depth understanding of the last mile in close dialogue with financial institutions and country authorities to help them identify solutions.
Our research identified several common drivers of delays: regulatory reporting requirements, currency, FX and other risk controls, lack of real-time 24/7 infrastructure, and manual processes.
The report found that the financial industry and policymakers can significantly improve the speed of cross-border payments by focusing on the beneficiary leg, and countries can reap the resulting economic benefits. At Swift, we continue to offer advice and services to financial institutions and authorities to help them understand how they can boost their incoming payment speed and improve their services.
5. Swift-led experiments reveal blueprint for collaborative fraud defence using AI
Financial crime is a global challenge, costing the financial industry an estimated USD 485 billion in 2023, according to Nasdaq Verafin. To tackle this, we partnered with 13 global banks to test how artificial intelligence with privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) could help the industry fight cross-border payment fraud.
Using artificial data from ten million test transactions, our trials demonstrated that the collaborative model was twice as effective at identifying known fraudulent transactions compared to models trained on data from a single institution – a clear indication of how collaboration can materially strengthen fraud detection.
In one use case, the PETs enabled participants to verify intelligence on suspicious accounts in real-time, a development which could speed up the time taken to identify complex international financial crime networks and avoid fraudulent transactions being executed.
Looking ahead
The achievements of the last 12 months share a common theme: collaboration drives progress. As we move into 2026, we remain committed to working with our community toward our shared ambition: making international payments as seamless as domestic ones – regardless of how value moves or the form it takes – all built on a foundation of security, resilience, and trust. We look forward to sharing progress on this journey throughout the year.
Shaping the future of finance, together
