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Nice post Hirander. The old and the new must indeed come together.

Too much hype indeed. The potential may be there, but nothing much will come of it in FS without a lot of cooperation between institutions. This needs some unselfish industry cooperation and imho a lot of central bank cooperation. Potential will remain untapped unless and until a simple mechanism is found to convert fiat money to emoney.

Agree with you. They want to avoid mistakes, which is great, but over time have become too hidebound. Experiement, fail faster. 

To paraphrase Bill Gates words about banking: "SWIFT the format, i.e. ISO, is essential, SWIFT the carrier is not"

We do not need SWIFT to move messages from A to B. Others can and do offer services for that. To its credit, SWIFT has done a good job of moving away from charging only per message, with its bulk pricing. We do though as a banking community need channels and forums for dealing with one another and SWIFT is moving, albeit slowly and arguably late, to improves its post-trade services. The success of ventures like CLS that provide a forum for banks to settle trades and even of the various LCH services show that banks need these forums or platforms to manage settle their business.

To stay relevant, SWIFT needs to provide more than just a message carrying service.