According to chief information officer Tom Zschach, “For CBDCs, our technology will enable central banks to connect their own networks simply and directly to all the other payments systems in the globe through a single gateway.”
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, reported on Wednesday that two different experiments it conducted successfully moved central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenized assets on the current financial infrastructure. Results showed that “CBDCs can be rapidly deployed at scale to support commerce and investment between more than 200 nations and territories around the world,” according to SWIFT.
Over 11,500 financial institutions are connected through the Belgian messaging system SWIFT, which is crucial in facilitating global trade. Nine out of ten central banks worldwide are actively investigating digital currencies. Through its partnership with Capgemini, SWIFT was able to settle transactions using both a fiat-to-CBDC payment network and CBDCs built on various distributed ledger technologies.
In order to hasten the deployment of CBDC on a large scale, fourteen central and commercial banks, including Banque de France, Deutsche Bundesbank, HSBC, Intesa Sanpaolo, NatWest, SMBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, and Wells Fargo, are currently working together in a testing environment.
In the second experiment, SWIFT showed that different kinds of cash payments could be integrated with tokenization systems using its infrastructure. SWIFT investigated 70 scenarios mimicking the market issuance and secondary market transfers of tokenized bonds, shares, and cash while working with Citi, Clearstream, Northern Trust, and SETL. By 2027, the tokenization business, according to the World Economic Forum, may be worth $24 trillion. Tom Zschach, the chief innovation officer at SWIFT, commented on the developments:
“Digital currencies and tokens have huge potential to shape how we will pay and invest in the future. But that potential can only be unleashed if the different approaches that are being explored have the ability to connect and work together. We see inclusivity and interoperability as central pillars of the financial ecosystem, and our innovation is a significant step towards unlocking the potential of the digital future.”
