Contents tagged with SWIFT

  • Russia and Turkey plan to abandon the US dollar in bilateral trade

    The governments of Russia and Turkey signed an agreement on payments in national currencies (rubble and lira), reports the Russian Finance Ministry.

    The purpose of the agreement is to increase the attractiveness of national currencies for Turkish and Russian companies, create an appropriate infrastructure of the financial market and gradually move to the use of the Russian ruble and the Turkish lira in payments between the parties.

    The intergovernmental agreement provides for the expansion of …

  • Western banks refuse to connect to Russia’s SWIFT alternative

    Major western banks have shown absolutely no interest in Russia’s alternative to the SWIFT payment system, which Russia created in 2016 after a sharp deterioration in its relations with the West, reports finanz.ru news outlet.

    In the three years that the Bank of Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) has existed, only eight foreign entities have connected to it, said Alla Bakina, director of the Bank of Russia’s national payment system, on Wednesday.

    Of these, only three …

  • Iran to switch to Russian SWIFT alternative

    Iran’s banking ties to other countries, including Russia, are growing, despite being disconnected from the SWIFT payment system, said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday, reports TASS.

    “Fortunately, today Iran’s banking relations with several other countries are growing without the use of the SWIFT system,” the official presidential website cites Rouhani as saying. “There was a time when people in the West thought that banking relations were only SWIFT. But it’s not like that.”

    The …

  • Documents showing Turkey’s plans to join Russian SWIFT alternative found in dump near Moscow

    In July, Russia and Turkey held urgent negotiations on the possibility of connecting Turkish companies and banks to the Bank of Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), an alternative to the internationally used SWIFT system.

    On Monday, the Telegram channel Baza published photos of documents found at a dump near Moscow, one of which mentions nogatiations conducted by the Russian Finance Ministry to organize payments in national currencies, including support for the Russian “ …

  • Russia to connect to Chinese SWIFT alternative

    Russia and China have agreed to transition to an international payments mechanism that is independent of SWIFT, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseyev told Reuters in an interview.

    A corresponding point was included in the international agreement to develop payments in national currencies that was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June.

    At present, China is the most “dollarized” market of all that …

  • Russian companies prepare to be disconnected from SWIFT

    Russia’s largest companies continue to report that they are ready for a possible disconnection from the SWIFT international payment system.

    Gazprom Neft announced that it has followed Rostec and Rosneft in transitioning to the Central Bank of Russia’s SWIFT equivalent - the Financial Message Transmission System (FMTS).

    The nearly 100% Gazprom-owned company, which holds the 4th place for oil extraction in Russia, has begun to use the Russian SWIFT equivalent instead of the traditional one, …

  • Russia's industrial conglomerate Rostec plans to switch to the Russian equivalent of SWIFT system

    Russia's Rostec State corporation and the Bank of Russia will switch over to a national system for the transfer of financial messages of the Bank of Russia (SPFS), an equivalent of the SWIFT (Society for Wordwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) service. The press service of Rostec reported that the system will be used as a channel for the exchange of financial information between all participants of the SPFS. “The digital infrastructure will exchange data in an encrypted mode, which …

  • Kremlin: Russian banks and companies ready to be disconnected from SWIFT

    If Russia is disconnected from the SWIFT interbank system, it will impede bank operation and necessitate the use of outdated technology, but Russian financial institutes and companies are technologically prepared to do this, stated Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich in response to students’ questions during the opening ceremony of the seventh session of the “International Model United Nations” conference.

    “Of course it [the disconnection from SWIFT] would not be pleasant, because …

  • Kremlin: Russia is ready to be disconnected from SWIFT

    The Russian economy is ready to work without being connected to the SWIFT international bank transfer system, stated Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovych at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

    “It can work without SWIFT, at some point SWIFT did not exist. Of course, all of this is a little slower and not as effective, but it can work,” Dvorkovych said, as cited by TASS and RIA Novosti.

    He added that the Russian government hopes that there will be no disconnection from SWIFT, because …

  • Media: cyber theft using SWIFT system hits Russian bank

    Kommersant, citing computer security experts, reports that, for the first time in Russia, hackers have managed to carry out a cyberattack on a bank in Russia and withdraw money through the international SWIFT system. This information was confirmed to the publication by the Central Bank; however, the publication’s sources did not name either the bank in which the attack was carried out, or the amount of damage.

    The company Group-IB, which specializes in cybersecurity issues, told the …