SWIFT Messages Hit All-Time High, Driven By gpi Adoption

SWIFT, a leader in secure financial messaging services, said that it facilitated an average of 31 million messages a day in 2018, an increase of 11 percent over 2017, and 56 percent over the last five years, according to a press release.

Also, the service’s annual traffic reached 7.8 billion, an all-time high. Much of the growth was driven by SWIFT gpi, which makes up more than 55 percent of cross-border payment instructions that happen on the network. SWIFT gpi was introduced two years ago.

The organization’s payments traffic also hit a new peak traffic number in a single day in 2018, processing 35.22 million FIN messages on May 31.

Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO at SWIFT, said he was ecstatic about the numbers.

“Our traffic increase is remarkable, and I’m delighted we’ve hit an all-time high of 35 million messages in a single day,” he said. “This is not only indicative of the wider growth in the global economy, but also the financial services industry’s continued trust in SWIFT. The success of SWIFT gpi and its rapid adoption has played a key part in our increased annual message traffic, with well over a million payments a day now passing over gpi.”

SWIFT’s gpi service is supported by hundreds of banks, and is used to send more than $300 billion in payments every day. SWIFT claims a 99.998 percent availability for its FIN and 99.999 availability for SWIFTNet messaging services.

Yawar Shah, chairman at SWIFT, said he wants to see the successful trends continue into 2019.

“In 2018, SWIFT continued its core mission and commitment to its customers by ensuring high security and continued reliability,” he said. “This was achieved against a backdrop of rolling out new capabilities, such as the Payment Controls Service and instant payment solutions in Australia and Europe. I’m confident that in 2019, SWIFT will continue to accelerate this momentum across its payments, securities and financial crime compliance areas.”