Swift’s blockchain-based shared ledger is entering its first practical test, with 17 banks across six continents preparing to pilot live cross-border transactions using tokenised deposits. The ledger was developed with input from 40 financial institutions worldwide. The initial cohort of 17 includes banks from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and the Americas. Swift has not yet opened the ledger for general use. The banks will enter an initial controlled go-live phase before functionality and availability are expanded.

The significance of the 9 July announcement is not that Swift has built another blockchain. Banks, central banks and market infrastructures have spent years testing distributed ledger technology, tokenised deposits, stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. The harder problem is emerging as those experiments move closer to production: a tokenised deposit issued by one bank is a liability of that institution and does not automatically move between banks as a common settlement asset.

Swift is attempting to address that interbank problem without issuing money, holding settlement assets or replacing existing payment and settlement systems. Its ledger records interbank obligations and orchestrates final settlement through existing infrastructure. In its first iteration, final settlement does not occur on the Swift ledger itself.

That distinction goes to the centre of Swift’s strategy. The cooperative is extending its infrastructure into blockchain-based finance while continuing its role as a technical operator rather than acting as an issuer or settlement institution. Avalon Ingram, digital assets business lead at Swift, described its intended position more narrowly: “We are aiming to be glue.”
The business question is whether that orchestration role can connect separate bank-issued tokenised deposits sufficiently well to deliver benefits that individual bank networks cannot achieve on their own.

The ledger is solving an interbank liability problem

The starting point for Swift is commercial bank money. Tokenised deposits allow banks to represent deposit liabilities digitally and make transactions programmable. For a large international bank with an extensive branch and account network, that can already improve treasury management for clients operating across several markets.

The limitation appears when a corporate uses more than one bank. “Traditionally, tokenised deposits are a walled garden. They are siloed,” Ingram said. A multinational may obtain a degree of 24-hour treasury capability if it holds accounts across multiple jurisdictions with one institution, but few large companies operate through a single bank.

Avalon Ingram, Digital Assets Business Lead at Swift

The underlying problem is that deposits issued by different banks represent liabilities of different institutions. Tokenising them does not turn them into a single fungible liability. “This is really where the Swift ledger comes in,” Ingram said.

The shared ledger acts as an interbank liability record, tracking obligations between participating institutions and orchestrating settlement through existing systems. “We are not actually exchanging value in this circumstance,” Ingram explained. “We are just recording that interbank liability, and then we’re orchestrating the settlements.”

The ledger therefore separates the coordination of a digital payment from the final movement of settlement value. Settlement can still occur in central bank money or through correspondent banking relationships.

This is a more incremental approach than the language of blockchain settlement may suggest. SWIFT is not asking participating banks to adopt a new common settlement asset before they can use the ledger.

Instead, it is attempting to coordinate transfers between separate bank-issued tokenised deposits without turning them into a single common settlement asset.

The pilot will need to demonstrate that separate tokenised-deposit systems can connect, that interbank obligations can be recorded reliably and that off-ledger settlement can be orchestrated without creating new reconciliation or control problems.

Tokenised deposits offer the lowest-friction starting point

Ingram said the decision to begin with tokenised deposits came from the institutions involved in developing the ledger rather than Swift imposing an asset model. “We have made no decision ourselves from a design perspective. We are very much being led by the industry,” she said.

The choice reflects both regulatory pragmatism and existing banking economics. Ingram said tokenised deposits sit within familiar prudential treatment for the most part, reducing the regulatory novelty compared with introducing a new form of money and a new infrastructure simultaneously.

“It’s okay to be incremental,” Ingram said. “You don’t have to go and completely change the way you do things altogether, and then try and backpedal because we haven’t thought about all of the different risks that are associated.”

This differs from models based on regulated stablecoins or wholesale settlement assets. A common digital asset creates a transferable instrument under a defined issuance and reserve or settlement structure. Tokenised deposits preserve the liability relationship between a customer and its bank.

The trade-off is the need to coordinate transactions between separate bank liabilities. SWIFT's approach allows banks to retain deposits on their balance sheets and preserve existing client relationships while using a common layer to record interbank obligations and orchestrate settlement.

The economic value will depend on what happens behind that coordination layer. Recording obligations continuously does not itself remove funding requirements, credit risk or the need for final settlement.

SWIFT’s proposition is that shared visibility, coordination and programmability can improve how existing settlement arrangements are used before the industry moves towards broader forms of on-chain settlement.

24-hour payments may be the first use case, not the final business case

SWIFT has positioned 24/7 cross-border payments as the ledger’s first use case. Yet continuous settlement is not necessarily the most important problem for every corporate treasury.

For retail users, cross-border payment friction is often visible at the last mile: delivery time, fee transparency, foreign exchange charges and beneficiary reach. Swift is addressing those issues separately through its new payments framework.

Wholesale payments face a different constraint. Large-value transactions cannot simply be routed through domestic instant-payment systems, many of which impose value thresholds. Banks must also manage liquidity, nostro funding, market operating hours and settlement risk across currencies and jurisdictions.

That split between value and volume is part of why Swift sequenced its work the way it has, according to Kevin Tay, Head of Strategy, Payment Scheme at Swift. The payments framework was introduced first to improve today's cross-border payment experience, while the shared ledger prepares Swift for future digital value infrastructure. "Ultimately, what we hope to achieve is to bring the two together," he said, with the end state being a single point of access through which financial institutions can transact in all forms of value, delivered quickly and easily to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Kevin Tay, Head of Strategy, Payment Scheme at Swift

Ingram said the common thread between Swift’s existing payment improvements and the ledger is changing expectations around cross-border payments. Customers and financial institutions have experienced faster domestic payments and increasingly expect international transactions to improve as well.

But the ledger’s potential value may extend beyond making a payment at three o’clock in the morning. If a bank and its nostro counterparty are both connected, Ingram said the ledger may support liquidity optimisation. It could also provide a mechanism for transactions that need to occur outside conventional market infrastructure cut-off times.

“If we can start to provide at least a vehicle when a bank needs to make an out-of-hour payment, I think that’s already a win,” she said. The larger opportunity may lie in programmability.

Traditional financial institutions can optimise their own internal processes, but they cannot require counterparties to make the same changes. Programmable payments potentially allow transaction logic to operate across institutions.

“This event cannot happen if another event has not happened,” Ingram said, describing how payment sequences could become event-driven.

That shifts the proposition from payment speed towards coordinated execution. Payments could be linked to conditions, events or other transactions across an ecosystem.

Swift’s announcement also points to programmable money and agentic commerce as future possibilities. Ingram argued that programmable money will become necessary if autonomous artificial intelligence agents and machine-driven commerce eventually initiate and coordinate financial transactions.

She added that the evolution of Swift's shared ledger continues to be guided by participating financial institutions, reflecting Swift's collaborative approach to developing new capabilities. For Swift, the immediate issue is integrating digital assets into regulated finance while maintaining trust, safety, resilience and compliance. The reinvention of financial activity may follow, but the first business test is more immediate: whether continuous coordination can improve liquidity use, out-of-hours transactions and cross-bank payment execution.

Regulatory clarity has accelerated the move from experiment to infrastructure

The speed of Swift’s development is notable. The shared ledger moved from concept to readiness for initial use in about nine months.

Ingram said increasing regulatory clarity has given banks greater confidence to progress digital finance initiatives. “If we didn’t think that this was a confirmed part of our future, we wouldn’t see the regulatory speak coming forward,” she said.

She observed that jurisdictions moving fastest in digital finance tend to have clearer regulatory positions on stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank digital currencies. “Clarity is also the spark of innovation,” she said.

The change over the past 18 months, in her assessment, is that banks have greater confidence to move projects forward within more clearly defined operating boundaries. That has coincided with experimentation in consortium-backed stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank settlement models.

Swift itself has explored blockchain technology since 2017. The difference now is the attempt to move beyond proof-of-concept work into initial live institutional use. That distinction matters because digital finance has accumulated years of technically successful pilots that have not necessarily generated recurring transaction volumes.

A ledger ready for initial use removes one barrier. It does not establish commercial adoption. The controlled go-live must now show that the technology works across separate bank environments, that existing compliance and control frameworks can continue to operate and that banks identify transaction flows where the shared orchestration layer creates sufficient economic value to change existing behaviour.

17 banks provide reach, but critical mass will depend on use

The emergence of consortium-based stablecoins and shared settlement networks raises an obvious question for Swift: does digital financial infrastructure require sufficient network density before liquidity and adoption become self-reinforcing?

Ingram did not treat network density as the ledger’s immediate priority. “I don’t think that network density is the primary focus,” she said. “I think it will be an ultimate outcome.”

The distinction reflects the uneven maturity of banks’ digital asset strategies. Before optimising network effects, SWIFT first needs institutions to become comfortable using blockchain infrastructure within existing compliance and control frameworks.

That makes the 17-bank cohort less a measure of critical mass than an initial test of institutional readiness. Its composition nevertheless matters. The banks span six continents and include major cross-border transaction institutions, but no mainland Chinese bank is among the initial 17. That omission is notable given China’s role in developing alternative cross-border digital money infrastructure, including mBridge, and raises a longer-term question about how globally representative the ledger can become.

Asked about Swift’s global neutrality and participation across different markets, Ingram said the cooperative did not hand-pick institutions for the development work or the initial cohort but invited its community to participate. More than 40 institutions contributed to the ledger’s development, while the 17 banks preparing for the initial phase opted into the next stage.

“We invite the community in,” Ingram said. “We don’t hand pick anyone.”

For a member-owned cooperative operating across more than 200 markets and territories the geographic development of the network will be an issue to watch. If the ledger is ultimately intended to connect an increasingly multi-asset and fragmented financial system, its ability to extend participation into markets developing alternative cross-border digital money infrastructure may become as important as the transaction flows generated by the first 17 banks.

Ingram added that Swift foresees additional institutions joining the ledger initiative.

But participation does not automatically create a network effect. The experience of consortium-based financial infrastructure has repeatedly shown that membership, investment and technical connectivity do not guarantee recurring transaction volume.

For Swift, the practical measure of adoption will be whether banks identify flows that are materially better executed through the shared orchestration layer than through existing infrastructure.

Out-of-hours payments may provide an early use case. Better visibility over liquidity obligations between connected counterparties may provide another. Programmable interbank payment flows could eventually create uses that are difficult to execute on today’s rails.

The pilot therefore needs to establish more than technical connectivity. It must demonstrate recurring use cases, operational reliability and sufficient economic benefit for banks to route real transactions through the ledger.

Ingram’s definition of success was ultimately less technological.

At that point, she said, customers should not need know whether the underlying infrastructure is blockchain-based or traditional technology, as the focus should be on the customer experience and outcomes.

Swift is betting on a multi-asset world

The shared ledger is entering a market in which banks, central banks and consortiums are developing different forms of digital money and settlement infrastructure. Partior, Fnality, Qivalis and Project Agorá illustrate the divergence: the industry has not agreed on a single asset, liability or settlement model.

Swift's response is not to select one. “I honestly believe that we are going to stay in a multi-asseted world,” Ingram said.

The reason is economic and regulatory as much as technological. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank money have different liability, liquidity and settlement characteristics. Jurisdictions may also favour different models according to their regulatory frameworks and policy objectives.

Banks are therefore likely to select forms of digital money according to the use case and the markets in which they operate. A tokenised deposit settled with central bank digital currency may suit one institutional flow. A regulated stablecoin may be more convenient for another use case.

Swift's response is to remain asset agnostic. “We want to be an orchestrator, we want to be interoperable,” Ingram said. “We are just the pipeline. It’s not for us to determine the asset type.”

That places interoperability rather than asset issuance at the centre of the strategy. As on-chain settlement venues mature, including central bank digital currencies, financial market infrastructure tokens and regulated stablecoins, Ingram said they could potentially be incorporated into the ledger to support atomic settlement.

The current use of tokenised deposits therefore should not be read as SWIFT selecting an eventual winner. It is the asset participating banks consider the most practical starting point.

Swift is extending orchestration beyond messaging

The shared ledger builds on Swift's existing role in cross-border payments while introducing new capabilities to support digital asset transactions. For more than five decades, Swift has provided secure financial messaging between financial institutions without issuing money or undertaking settlement. It carries instructions between financial institutions but does not issue money or undertake settlement.

The shared ledger moves Swift more deeply into the transaction workflow. It records interbank obligations, provides a common view of those obligations and orchestrates settlement.
Tay argued that three factors distinguish genuine commercial deployment: trust, resilience and scale.

Ingram reinforced that Swift is not becoming a financial market infrastructure or settlement institution. “We are continuing our role as a technical operator,” she said.

Swift does not issue assets and does not undertake final settlement. Ingram described its traditional and future role as an “interoperable orchestrator”. The distinction is institutionally important. But the ledger still represents an expansion in how Swift's technology participates in a transaction.

Messaging communicates an instruction between institutions. A shared ledger can provide a common record of the obligation between them and apply logic to the sequence in which events occur.

Swift’s strategic bet is that the digital financial system will remain fragmented across assets, networks and settlement models. Banks, central banks and consortiums are likely to continue developing different forms of digital money because their regulatory environments, liquidity models and use cases differ.

The risk is that each becomes another digital island. “Fragmentation is not just a bingo game word. It’s not just the flavour of the week,” Ingram said. “There are real consequences to fragmentation.” Swift wants to provide the connecting layer. “We are aiming to be glue,” she said.

A similar view runs through Swift's payments business. According to Tay, domestic instant-payment links tends to operate at a different layer of the financial system from Swift's messaging and orchestration role. Rather than competing with such initiatives, Swift sees them as complementary. "What Swift offers is secure and standardised messaging that allows financial institutions to transact across securities, trade and payments," he said, adding that the cooperative is "also working to reduce fragmentation in the global ecosystem" because "together, all these initiatives can help build a more interconnected global payment ecosystem."

Interoperability will determine whether the ledger becomes infrastructure

The controlled go-live will show whether interoperability can become recurring transaction flow. Swift's advantage is its existing global reach. Its constraint is that participation in a messaging network does not automatically translate into adoption of a blockchain-based ledger. The first 17 banks must demonstrate that common orchestration delivers sufficient value in liquidity visibility, out-of-hours payments and cross-bank programmability to justify changing how transactions are routed.

Within Swift, the shared ledger and the payments scheme are framed as parallel initiatives converging on a single strategy. According to Tay, one is focused on delivering the best cross-border payment experience using today's technology through the payments scheme, while the other focuses on ensuring new, regulated forms of digital money can be used securely and at scale across Swift’s trusted infrastructure, including through the shared ledger.

The limitations are equally clear. A shared ledger can record obligations and orchestrate settlement, but it cannot create liquidity, eliminate credit risk or make banks use it.

The longer-term proposition rests on fragmentation. If digital finance remains multi-asset and spread across different networks, the value of a neutral orchestration layer may increase as the number of separate systems grows.

Banks may not agree on a common form of digital money. Swift is betting that they will still need a common way to coordinate its movement.

If that proves correct, Swift does not need to decide whether tokenised deposits, stablecoins or central bank digital currencies win. Its opportunity lies in making that choice less consequential to the movement of value.

Whether the ledger becomes infrastructure will depend on whether the first 17 banks can turn that proposition into recurring transaction flow.