BRUSSELS, June 23: SWIFT, the financial network at the heart of the latest US privacy row, is run from a small commuter town south of Brussels but deals with trillions of dollars in daily worldwide transactions.
The cooperative, which confirmed on Friday that it complied with US authorities seeking data in the wake of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, serves nearly 8,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication is based in La Hulpe, a leafy town south of the Belgian capital, although it has offices worldwide employing a total of 1,800 staff.
Founded in 1973, SWIFT is familiar to anyone who has moved money between bank accounts internationally: the so-called SWIFT number, or BIC code, is essential to ensure the transaction goes through rapidly.
Officials are quick to underline that it is not a bank, nor does it hold any accounts for clients.
“SWIFT is the industry-owned cooperative supplying secure, standardised messaging services and interface software to over 7,800 financial institutions worldwide,” it says on its website.
It handles an average of 11 million transactions daily, worth something in the order of six trillion dollars every day, according to the New York Times, one of the newspapers which broke the story this week.
Media reports suggest that the post-9/11 probes centred on SWIFT are not the first time it has been used by anti-terror investigators.
Its database, described by one former US official as “the mother lode,” has provided clues to money trails and ties between possible terrorists and groups financing them, officials told the New York Times.
It directly led to the capture of Al-Qaeda operative Riduan Isamuddin, believed to have masterminded 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, the Times said.
It has also helped identify a US man convicted of helping an Al-Qaeda member launder 200,000 dollars through a Pakistani bank, prosecutors told the Times. —AFP
