Swift: New numbers and update on initiatives

At Swift's pre-Sibos press briefing yesterday the usual group of trade press assembled to hear about Swift's plans for this year's Sibos event in Vienna.

Along with the usual talk about "strategy" and "community", a few figures stood out:

• Over 6,300 people are registered so far for this year's Sibos, with 18% from the UK and 12% from the US.
• Just 150 of these are representatives of asset management firms - a sector that Swift is targeting with its own stream in the Sibos conference programme
• Swift says that about 80% of the top 500 asset management firms are already Swift customers, but the second phase of the Swift Alliance Lite initiative (being officially launched at Sibos) will be actively targeting the smaller asset management firms.
• Corporates using Swift now number around 350, with around 150 (up from 40 last year) of these accessing Swift using the newer SCORE model, as opposed to the old MA-CUG model
• A discussion paper has been circulated internally ahead of the SWIFT board meetings at Sibos about relaxing the corporate eligibility requirements to allow certain non-listed companies to participate.
• Of Swift's 8,542 customers, Gottfried Leibbrandt, Head of Markets at Swift, says that several hundred are in the US, but more than 1,000 are in Russia.

This latter point is particularly interesting. It's often been pointed out that Swift doesn't have the penetration it could/should have in North America. But with the appointment of Chris Church as CEO of Americas and global head of securities back in May, and opening a San Francisco office last month, this is obviously an area Swift is keen to address.

What of the large number of Russian customers? Is it just that there's a lot of oil and gas wealth inside Russia looking to get out, and banks prefer to use Swift as a mechanism for moving their own and  customers' money abroad? This is part of the reason, I'm sure. But I guess it's also due to Swift's close relationships with national infrastructures there such as Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX), National Depository Centre (NDC) and MICEX Settlement House.