SWIFT in brief

The acronym stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. S.W.I.F.T. is a co-operative society.
S.W.I.F.T. was formed when seven Major International Banks met in 1974 to discuss the limitations of Telex as a means of secure delivery of payment and confirmation information, primarily in the Treasury and Correspondent banking areas. Telex suffered from a number of limitations due to its speed, its free format, and the lack of security
The decision was taken at that time to form the society and three years later in 1977, 230 banks in 5 countries went live. New countries and users were added subsequently.

S.W.I.F.T. services

S.W.I.F.T. operates a number of services, primarily:
GPA: General Purpose Application, which only allows system messages, i.e.. messages from a user to S.W.I.F.T. and vice versa, not from one user to another
FIN: Financial Application, which is the user to user service comprising, System Messages MT0nn, User to User Messages MT1nn through 9nn and Service Messages such as Acknowledgements
Additionally, S.W.I.F.T. also provides a number of services that are charged for over and above the normal fees