SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), headquartered in Belgium, provides services that are essential to financial transactions around the world. Every day over 9,000 institutions in more than 200 countries exchange financial messages by the SWIFT standards. In Italy, SWIFT is one of two operators of telecommunications infrastructures within the “Electronic data transmission system”, also called the National Interbank Network.
Although SWIFT is neither a payment and settlement system nor a bank, it is crucial to the operational status of a large number of systemically important infrastructures, markets and banks. Accordingly, central banks have devised a method of “cooperative” oversight, with the coordination of the National Bank of Belgium.
Oversight is intended to guarantee security, reliability, business continuity, and infrastructural resilience. To make sure these objectives are attained, overseeers examine SWIFT’s governance, structures, processes, risk control procedures and control systems. While concentrating on the detection and mitigation of operational risk, the overseers also consider legal risk, the transparency of access agreements and policies, strategies, and any other matters deemed relevant to the objectives.
The guidelines for oversight of SWIFT are set out in “High Level Expectations for the Oversight of SWIFT”.
