The era of SWIFT's sole dominion over international settlements didn't end yesterday, but today we see clearly: there's no turning back. Geopolitics and technology, working in tandem, are transforming a monopolist into just one player among many. The global payments landscape is cracking at the seams, and these fractures can no longer be patched over with diplomatic memoranda.
Cutting Off Comes at a Cost
Using SWIFT as a financial weapon has produced the opposite effect. When Iranian, and later Russian, banks found themselves cut off, it became clear that this doesn't paralyze economies—it merely accelerates the creation of parallel routes. Tellingly, Russia's SPFS analogue grew after 2022 to include more than 200 foreign participants from 20 countries by 2025, with its share of cross-border transfers by Russian banks exceeding a third. Not fatal for SWIFT, but contagious for the rest of the world—Global South countries are watching closely and taking notes: if they're cut off tomorrow, better to have a backup airfield today.
The Digital Yuan Doesn't Ask SWIFT's Permission
The main threat comes not from wires but from code. The mBridge project, uniting the central banks of China, Thailand, the UAE, and Hong Kong, enables cross-border payments in digital currencies directly—no correspondent accounts, and certainly no SWIFT. The platform has already completed a pilot with real transactions, and in 2024 Saudi Arabia joined the initiative. This isn't science fiction but a working prototype of a new settlement architecture, where tokenized money moves like a file in a messenger app—fast and nearly free.
CIPS: The Chinese Elephant in the China Shop
China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) has long since stopped being a mere "backup airfield" and become a full-fledged competitor. In 2025, it processed yuan-denominated transactions totaling approximately 150 trillion yuan, with the number of direct participants exceeding 150—growing by double digits annually. Moreover, over the past two years, more African and Latin American banks have joined CIPS than in the entire preceding decade: sanctions work as the best advertisement for an alternative. The main question isn't whether CIPS will replace SWIFT, but how quickly the yuan zone will become self-sufficient for countries tired of the dollar's swings.
A Technological Fossil
SWIFT was created in the 1970s and resembles a well-oiled telegraph: expensive transactions, lengthy reconciliation, chains of intermediary banks. Even traditional banks are increasingly integrating stablecoins for instant settlements with counterparties in "toxic" jurisdictions—not out of love for crypto, but because business demands speed, not bureaucracy. An average SWIFT payment still takes hours, sometimes days, while on-chain settlements close in seconds. Blockchain bridges and API gateways are turning the old architecture into a museum exhibit still used out of habit—but habits, as we know, change faster than banking regulations.
What Awaits Us
The world won't be left without SWIFT, but SWIFT won't remain the center of the world either. We're heading toward a fragmented system: several regional clearing platforms, blockchain corridors for digital currencies, and good old SWIFT for whatever remains. The financial "Silk Road belt" is ceasing to be a metaphor and becoming reality, where the monopoly of Western payment architecture gives way to multi-vector chaos. Already on the horizon loom BRICS Bridge and the digital euro's ambitions in cross-border payments—each new project taking a bite out of the former monopolist's market share. And this is here to stay, because trust once lost cannot be restored by directives or communiqués.
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