Swift's Blockchain Ledger Goes Live With 17 Banks for Cross-Border Payments

Swift's blockchain-based shared ledger is ready for use. Seventeen banks are preparing live pilot transactions on the platform, which supports 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits, the company said Thursday.

The ledger gives banks a secure orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenized deposits on their own ledgers. It lets them move funds for customers on nights and weekends before final settlement completes via existing systems. Swift described this as the first use case for the ledger, announced last year and built over nine months with input from international financial institutions.

“With our new ledger capability, we’re extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money,” Thierry Chilosi, Swift’s chief business officer, said in a news release. “It allows tokenised value to move across borders with the velocity and flexibility modern commerce expects, while maintaining the same high levels of resiliency, security, and compliance global finance requires.”

Chilosi added that the “strong support” from banks demonstrates “the practical value of this approach – one that will help scale benefits globally while creating a foundation for future innovation in areas like programmable money and agentic commerce.”

Swift’s infrastructure already moves the equivalent of world GDP every two to three days between more than 200 markets. The new ledger, the company said, “sets the stage for next generation innovation and interoperability on infrastructure already trusted” for that volume.

Separate research from PYMNTS Intelligence shows that small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly using FinTech companies for cross-border payments. 36% of internationally active SMBs said they would use FinTechs or payment providers for cross-border transactions, up from 30% last year. 91% rated their experience as good. The data suggests businesses value providers that simplify a traditionally complicated process, PYMNTS wrote last week.

Swift’s ledger has been designed to work with bank-issued tokenized deposits, not to replace existing settlement rails. The pilot will test whether the orchestration layer can speed up settlement while maintaining the compliance and security standards the network is known for. Robinhood Chain Live on Dune Analytics for Tokenized Asset Data and Databento raises $97M for institutional market data across crypto and TradFi are two other examples of institutional infrastructure moving toward blockchain-based asset movement.

The 17 banks have not been named publicly. Swift said the pilot will begin in the coming weeks.