SWIFT

Blockchain's potential for revolutionizing the world’s payment systems has captured the imagination in recent years, and last month Santander became the U.K.'s first bank to use the technology to create a new international payments service.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication has its sights set on expanding real-time payments in the Asia-Pacific region as part of its plan to further its first value-add service created from the Global Payments Innovation initiative.

The tracking engine automatically provides status updates to all GPI banks involved in any GPI payment chain and allows them to confirm when a payment has been completed.

The network says more than $100 billion in Swift GPI payment messages are sent daily, enabling payments to be credited to the end beneficiaries within minutes — and some within seconds.

Enterprise customers will be able to send payment data to the bank through an application programming interface, rather than as XML or Swift files.

Cybersecurity systems, as sophisticated as they are, are clearly not doing the job. And maybe they never will, given that in the end the effectiveness of those systems can be overridden by workers inside the organization, writes Tal Vegvizer, director of research and development for Bufferzone.

To help its member banks avoid the nightmare of a data breach, Swift is requiring they take the necessary security steps to establish a strong baseline of cyber defense. And Swift intends to make sure its banks all follow the same procedures.

The digital-currency startup, which markets software to banks, appears keen to signal that it wants to play by the rules.

Finance organizations serious about protecting their customers need two-factor authentication, which involves the mobile phone when logging in to transfer money, writes Michael Patterson, CEO of Plixer.

The bank consortium is going directly after the business of its former partner Ripple in the middle of their legal battle over an option for digital currency worth $1 billion.