A 20-page in-depth report on distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) comes as a result of SWIFT’s collaboration with Accenture consulting company as SWIFT plans to become a DLT-based services provider.

Focused on the technology’s technical, operational and business capabilities, the report highlights both the opportunities blockchain brings and challenges faced by DLTs in terms of wider adoption within the financial industry.

The report lists strong governance, data control, compliance with regulatory requirements, standardisation, identity framework, security, cyber defence, reliability and scalability among the technology’s current areas of underperformance, and suggests how DLTs can be further improved to overcome the said issues.

Since blockchain has a number of distinguishing features the company finds potentially rewarding, SWIFT promises to develop its own DLT-based platform to provide related services to more than 11,000 of its members as soon as blockchain ”matures “and “firm business use cases emerge.”

The features of the DLTs praised in the report include the ability to keep the network updated on latest information in real time, to trace information flows back, to ease or even eliminate reconciliation processes requiring “significant human intervention,” to trust the data stored within the chains and to recover it in case of local system failure.

The authors of the report believe that the key to the future success of DLTs is the “clarity and consensus about the meaning of shared data in a multi-party business environment”, i.e. the development of clear business standards enabling interoperability between the emerging technology and the existing ones, such as the financial messaging.

SWIFT recommends not to regard distributed ledgers as a “silver bullet”, assessing every potential use case in relation to the technology’s strengths. The authors of the report use SWIFT as an example of a moderate approach which includes experimenting and engaging with the community to identify the areas where the technology is likely to bring “concrete business benefits.”

Through the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project, where SWIFT is a Board Member, as well as through its own innovation project Innotribe, the company claims to be “forging collaboration” between the projects’ members and other industry players.

Last autumn, SWIFT CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt admitted he was “keeping a very close eye” on the blockchain technology.



Maria Rudina