BREAKING: SWIFT To Announce Partnership With the R3 Consortium

SWIFT, the largest global bank payment network, is planning to partner with the R3 consortium. SWIFT CEO Gottfried LEIBBRANDT announced this during his panel speech at the Paris FinTech Forum. He also stated that the official announcement is scheduled later for today, January 30th.

Leibbrandt spoke at a panel with Brad GARLINGHOUSE, CEO of Ripple, a company that has long positioned itself as a competitor to the SWIFT network. Moreover, Garlinghouse made a statement in November 2018 that "what we are doing on a day-to-day basis is in fact taking over SWIFT."

More than 10,000 banks are currently connected to the SWIFT network. As for the blockchain, the network has conducted several pilot tests, but so far has not revised the old architecture. Such an announcement was really a big surprise.

Gottfried LEIBBRANDT also stressed the features of the GPI network:

“Our new GPI platform is extremely interoperable and open, and we’ve always had links to other networks [...] we are announcing later today a Proof-of-Concept with R3 blockchain on trade, where you can initiate a payment on the trade platform, and then it goes into GPI. So we’re exploring interconnectivity with a lot of things."

SWIFT's GPI platform aims to increase the transparency of cross-border payments. The development of GPI gained momentum last year, so there is a probability that a new partnership is caused by the increased competition from the emerging blockchains.

More than 300 partners from both private and public sectors are already collaborating with R3 to develop the Corda network, an open source blockchain platform.

Image courtesy of Coin.fyi