Microsoft is collaborating with Swift to enable cloud-native payment transfers on Azure.
Swift is a leading provider of secure financial messaging services, having more than 11,000 customers globally. Financial enterprises and banks use Swift’s secure services to send payment messages.
Together, Microsoft and Swift will facilitate the deployment of Swift messaging solutions in the cloud. It will enable a faster, more secure and efficient operations for banks, corporates, service bureaus, and other companies in payment ecosystem.
“I think this is a significant step forward for the payments industry. This provides increased business agility, security, compliance and performant system for any business team,” said George Zinn, CVP and Microsoft Treasurer.
The collaboration has formed a joint proof of concept (PoC) to host Swift infrastructure on Azure. Microsoft’s own treasury department is using the PoC to handle internal transactions.
The company said that its treasury department manages more than $150 billion in assets and supports more than $400 billion per year in Swift based payments.
“The joint deep engineering engagement between SWIFT and Microsoft has delivered a more secure and compliant cloud services that will benefit the industry as a whole,” said Ulrich Homann, distinguished Architect at Microsoft.
“In the future ecosystem of open banking and instant payments, we believe this partnership with SWIFT will enable our combined corporate customers to benefit from the agility, performance and high availability features only made possible by the Azure cloud.”
Additionally, the joint solution will open new doors to add business logic, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence capabilities to improve the way financial organizations conduct transfers.
With Swift partnership, Microsoft aims to develop a bank-like wire transfer experience that comes with additional security, operational and intelligence benefits.
“This is a big step forward in demonstrating the potential of the cloud in improving back-office operational efficiency. SWIFT continually seeks to reduce and remove friction and eliminate operational inefficiencies within the financial services payment ecosystem,” said Arnaud Boulnois, head of customer platforms at SWIFT.
“Cloud adoption continues to increase within the financial services industry, and we are thrilled to partner with Microsoft to bring the benefits of the cloud to SWIFT customers and ecosystem partners via Microsoft Azure.”
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Microsoft and Swift have already completed the first Azure cloud-native payment. The companies will provide the solution to joint customers in near future.
