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Today we are dealing with the SWIFT system - how it works, how money flows through it, and what the domestic elephant construction industry can offer instead of import abbreviations in response to offensive sanctions. And not only in response.
Like all other financial systems, SWIFT was also born at once from several parents who want to establish financial exchange between themselves and along the way to make money on it. Let's not faintly delve into history - this will not help understanding the technology, this information is very easy to find, and personally I was never seriously interested. For me, the cause-and-effect relationship is more important than specific names and dates (therefore, I am a Troechnik in history). Let's go straight to the delicious pulp.
Like most other information systems, the main task of SWIFT is to create a communication channel and exchange rules between participants. But unlike International Payment Systems (IPS), I would say that SWIFT is less centralized and somewhat more heterogeneous - this is my lasting impression of acquaintance with this system. This is due to the fact that MPS and SWIFT-like systems (and there is not only SWIFT in the world, there are a number of other more or less global organizations with a similar function) have slightly different goals. The work of the Ministry of Railways is focused mainly on instant servicing of individuals, while SWIFT is already for mastodons. No, individuals can also arrange SWIFT among themselves, but the main clients of SWIFT are still legal entities and financial institutions of various sizes and jurisdictions. And there, the speed of money exchange is not at all such a sensitive parameter as in the case of urgent payment for goods in a store. "Yuriki" are tolerant of several days' deadlines, while the hipster Feoktist cannot stand for so long at the POS terminal waiting for the payment for a bottle of water from the Alpine glaciers to be completed.
It is clear that in order to transfer money (and a number of other operations), you need to somehow transmit a message about this operation. Once there is a message and its transmission - that is, the message format, the transmission protocol and everything else associated with it. To put it very simply, all financial systems work in many ways similar to each other, and a financial transaction takes place, as it were, in two stages.
The first step is to create and transmit an informational payment message (although SWIFT has a whole zoo of different types of messages, not just money transfers). The second step is actually the exchange of financial assets.
How money is teleported from one bank to another - I already I wrote, but I will remind you briefly in this story, because there are some small peculiarities.
In order for a bank to make a transfer in the SWIFT system, it, surprisingly, must be a member of this organization. As usual, membership is paid, and not to say that very cheap. The bank pays both for joining the system and the annual subscription fee. As for whether he pays commissions for each transaction - here, I'm sorry, I'm still very far from specific tariffs. I only know that there is a whole line of tariffs, one more beautiful than the other, and each has some tasty bun for which this money is taken. And the cheapest connection and annual subscription rates are in the tens of thousands of euros. Alas, I do not have exact figures, but somewhere on the forum there was a figure in the region of 20-30 thousand euros for both. Still, this is not quite a penny, and the bank of a healthy person counts money well, especially if in their favor. And usually he chooses something with a minimum set of tasty buns, but more adequate in terms of the final profit. And rightly so, buns are fast carbohydrates, a thing that is unhealthy for the body, albeit tempting.
In addition to all organizational nuances, when connected, the bank receives a SWIFT identifier and a hardware and software complex for interacting with the SWIFTNet network. In principle, earlier this could mean anything - for example, from time to time a bank dials up a regional operator by modem and makes a communication session. Now, I believe, these anachronisms have already become obsolete, and the bank uses either public communication channels or specially leased ones, but in general, they are about the same as ordinary people. Those. all over the internet. In general, SWIFTNet is not a separate network from the rest of the Internet, but just a set of computers that are able to find each other and transfer messages between themselves.
By the way, it is interesting to remember that before the advent of SWIFT, international bank payments still existed. Financial messages were transmitted using an obsolete teletypewriter, but there it was almost necessary to describe the desired task in words, to whom and how much. "London City, ask at the corner." And SWIFT already has a fairly strict standard of what information should be in which field and in what format.
Of course, this hardware and software complex has encryption and signatures, everything is like ordinary people.
SWIFTNet and money transfer
SWIFTNet itself has two operational centers, in the Netherlands and the USA. In addition to them, there are regional operators (in Russia, if I'm not mistaken, this is RosSvift). Plus there can be group operators (of a lower rank). The job of all these nodes is to route messages, provide directories, keep track of the format, and so on. In other words, to ensure the operation of the infrastructure.When sending a payment, the client indicates the SWIFT identifier of the beneficiary's bank, as well as the account number in the format of the shameful for the Russian ear IBAN - International Bank Account Number. SWIFT includes many countries, each with its own legislation and its own account numbering rules. And far from everywhere these numbers consist of numbers, by the way (and not everywhere in Russia). Therefore, a certain general standard was needed.
But besides the recipient's address, there can be another interesting thing - Intermediary Bank. And here we come to an interesting nuance of the SWIFT system.
In fact, SWIFT does not have some kind of central bank for settlements, especially since banks can be in different countries. More precisely, some of these banks (for example, within the same country) may have accounts at the local central bank, and thus, as it were, are connected through it. But in most cases this is not the case. However, other mechanisms are more often used to transfer money between two banks. For example, Bourgeois-Bank opened an account with bank ITD-24, and vice versa, ITD-24 opened an account with Bourgeois-Bank. Let me remind you that in this case, these accounts are called correspondent accounts, or in abbreviated form - correspondent accounts. And thanks to these accounts, the movement of funds between the Bourgeois-Bank and ITD-24 is possible.
However, let's imagine a situation that the couch warrior Akaki decided to pay for a batch of machines for sewing socks to a Chinese manufacturer. And Akaki decided to do it from the ITD-24 bank. But Huang-He-Bank does not have a correspondent account with the ITD-24 bank. But on the other hand, both Huang-He-Bank and ITD-24 have their own correspondent accounts with the Bourgeois Bank. Fine! Akaki indicates Bourgeois-Bank as Intermediary Bank, and the payment goes from ITD-24 to Bourgeois-Bank, and from Bourgeois-Bank to Hua-He-Bank. True, everyone will take their own commission, and will delay processing, which somewhat overshadows the matter. But on the other hand, the payment goes through.
In general, a SWIFT payment can be much more complicated than I described just above. For example, there may be more than one intermediary bank, but several. And not even necessarily each of them is included in SWIFT. The payment can also go through one (or more) banks that are not connected to SWIFT. At these "sites" other mechanisms are used. After all, SWIFT is, basically, an information system, and banks can "move money" among themselves as they see fit. Not necessarily with SWIFT. But such schemes, of course, increase the likelihood of errors, as well as significantly increase the total commission and significantly delay the payment.
Therefore, for SWIFT payments, you need to carefully choose a bank. It is necessary that he, if possible, have a correspondent account with the receiving bank. This usually happens if both banks are large enough.
SPFS - financial messaging system
When they say that some country will be disconnected from some financial system, then you need to understand this. What if banks in this country know how to somehow interact with this financial system, then they have all the necessary hardware and software for this. Those. there are processings that work in formats and according to the rules of the same Ministry of Railways, there are automated workstations for clerks, there are all the necessary communication lines, etc. And if you "disconnect" the country, then only international payments will break - where there is a cross-border transition. Yes, this is really unpleasant, but information and financial flows inside the country will not stop. Everyone will work on the same formats, with the same processings, according to the same rules. Which means that you can create your own information and financial system. Something similar happened at the time of threats from Visa / MasterCard - we now have NSPK (World cards). And when they started talking about the possibility of disconnecting the country from SWIFT, the SPFS began to raise its head.Generally speaking, technically, there is not much difference with the help of which system banks exchange information and financial messages. It is possible to do this within the country using SWIFT messages - no one interferes. But in this particular case, some additional standards must be adopted. For example, in SWIFT there are many different fields in documents, and we need to agree on where to place our local, Russian attributes. Where to record VAT (and in what form), where to enter the invoice number in the Russian format, in what format to indicate the purpose of the payment, etc. In all other respects, this is SWIFT, already understandable to us, without any special alterations.
All that remains is to create your own operations center. Well, this, of course, is costly both in time and money, but still not to create from scratch. All protocols are known, all formats are known. System users already have ready-made software to interact according to these rules. There, of course, not everything is going smoothly either, but the basis for creating your own system is still very significant.
Another thing is that it is necessary to somehow establish communication with other countries ... But here the fact that the technical standards are the same as those of SWIFT comes to the rescue (although there may be some differences; this is also found in others systems). And therefore, it will only be necessary to involve banks of other countries to connect to our systems. I cannot assess how this corresponds to the SPFS plans, and how realistic it is, but I must say that this is how some international payment systems appeared. Such as JCB, China UnionPay and some others. Initially, these were internal, national payment systems (in this case, Japan and China). Which then began to expand into the world market and now firmly occupy a certain share on it.
For today this is all that my fingers were bent to print. If you have questions or suggestions on topics - I will be glad to receive feedback from you. Have a great week!
