The rapid acceleration in the digitisation of financial services over the past year has thrust innovation into focus for the financial industry. At Swift's recent Inside Innovation event, thought leaders from around the world highlighted the challenges that this presents firms with, and ways they can look to innovate for a successful future.

New article series from the Swift Institute in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Knowledge@Wharton explores today’s industry challenges

Cooperative demonstrates secure and scalable way to connect multiple blockchains for movement of tokenised assets around the world Swift can provide single point of entry for financial institutions moving tokenised assets while leveraging existing secure infrastructure Experiments are part of Swift’s ongoing work to maintain strong, secure interoperability across a fragmented financial ecosystem

In recent years, firms across the financial industry have been working intensively to embed emerging technologies into their customer offerings and back-office operations. But nascent trials are today fast being replaced by scalable, production-ready solutions. We sat down with our Innovation team to get their insights on the technologies and trends set to shape the financial services of the future.

Collaborative experiments with 38 global institutions demonstrate new use cases for Swift solution across digital trade, securities and foreign exchange Swift solution could enable financial institutions to easily incorporate CBDCs and other digital assets into common business practices Connector can interlink multiple networks and could lead to automated trade flows and unlock growth in tokenisation

ASEAN is becoming a major economic powerhouse in the region, with Singapore being the leader on many fronts. Swift Asia Pacific organised a business forum in Singapore on 9th July. More than 280 delegates came for a full day of information sharing, interactive discussion and networking with Swift staff and the local community from financial institutions, market infrastructures, technology partners and multinational corporations.

With 18 months to go until the end of the coexistence period, the daily average number of CBPR+ messages exchanged now exceeds one million. With steady progress continuing, at its March 2024 meeting, the Swift Board re-confirmed the community’s commitment to November 2025 as the end of the MT/ISO 20022 cross-border coexistence period, emphasising that priority should be given to instruction messages to ensure operational continuity and ongoing interoperability.

Bankers gathered at Swift event in Copenhagen are told that the future is bright, but they must open their eyes, never succumb to complacency, and be prepared to fight.

Swift’s Nicolas Stuckens talks to Money Laundering Bulletin.

During a recent roundtable discussion, representatives of Russia’s National Settlement Depository, Swift and the Russian National Swift Association (ROSSwift) explored the opportunities – and the obstacles – on the road to ISO 20022 adoption.