How does one connect to the SWIFT network? Say, someone wants to start a company for providing some financial service like fund transfer across borders, then connecting to SWIFT will be very helpful. I was always fascinated by how all this works and what does it take to directly use the SWIFT network. Any insights on this will be really helpful.
You generally need to be a bank or regulated financial institution.
SWIFT is just a messaging layer for correspondent banking. If you're not a bank, SWIFT access is about as useful as suddenly learning your country's president's cell phone number: Definitely cool, but the two of you would probably not have much to talk about.
I used SWIFT messages as part of my first real job (finance rather than tech). The format itself is comically loose, ill defined and fugly by any reasonable measure.
When something really screwed up you resorted to sending MT599 messages around, free format text messages.
I believe it's all SWIFT over IP this century so probably not dissimilar to any other API you might use.
You can go online to swift and apply. Large corporates can actually be members. We access the SWIFT network through a myriad of different banking and financial institutions we have created partnerships with.
I.e. if you go and create a neobank through a baas provider you will inadvertently get access to SWIFT, it won’t be direct but you have access.
To get true access you have to go through and insane process and have a ton of controls and policies and create trust with the governing body of SWIFT.
So am I right that SWIFT not only gives you a protocol that you can use to interop with other banks, but also some sort of DNS system that tells you how to send money to almost any other bank? This makes me think of the Bitcoin lightning network a bit as well. To reach bank Z, bank A needs to find a route of pairs of banks that can perform settlements, so there must be some sort of routing table to do that. That routing table is probably a service that swift provides and thus if they cut the russian banks from accessing this, they wouldn't be able to figure out how to reach other banks.
