SC, is a cooperative established in 1973 in Belgium (French: Société Coopérative) and owned by the banks and other member firms that use its service.

Before SWIFT's establishment, international financial transactions were communicated over Telex, a public system involving manual writing and reading of messages.

[5] SWIFT was set up out of fear of what might happen if a single private and fully American entity controlled global financial flows – which before was First National City Bank (FNCB) of New York – later Citibank.

Individuals who played a key role in its creation included bankers Jan Kraa (at AMRO Bank) and François Dentz (at the Banque de l'Union Parisienne) as well as Carl Reuterskiöld and Bessel Kok, who became respectively its first two chairmen and chief executives.

It soon started to establish common standards for financial transactions and a shared data processing system and worldwide communications network designed by Logica and developed by the Burroughs Corporation.

[8] In 1989 SWIFT completed a monumental new head office building in La Hulpe, designed by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura.

[13] The SWIFT secure messaging network is run from three data centres, located in the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

[21] In 2018, the International Monetary Fund has recommended that "the National Bank of Belgium should consider enhancing oversight with additional regulatory and supervisory powers.

As of 2024, in addition to the G10 central banks, the SWIFT Oversight Forum included the national central banks of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey.

In 2018, the London-based Financial Times noted that transfers frequently "pass through multiple banks before reaching their final destination, making them time-consuming, costly and lacking transparency on how much money will arrive at the other end".

A series of articles published on 23 June 2006 in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times revealed a program, named the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which the US Treasury Department, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other United States governmental agencies initiated after the 11 September attacks to gain access to the SWIFT transaction database.

[33] After the publication of these articles, SWIFT quickly came under pressure for compromising the data privacy of its customers by allowing governments to gain access to sensitive personal information.

Because of concerns about its potential contents, the European Parliament adopted a position statement in September 2009, demanding to see the full text of the agreement and asking that it be fully compliant with EU privacy legislation, with oversight mechanisms emplaced to ensure that all data requests were handled appropriately.

[41] The NSA intercepted and retained data from the SWIFT network used by thousands of banks to securely send transaction information.

[41] In April 2017, a group known as the Shadow Brokers released files allegedly from the NSA which indicate that the agency monitored financial transactions made through SWIFT.

said that "it is working with U.S. and European governments to address their concerns that its financial services are being used by Iran to avoid sanctions and conduct illicit business".

[47] On 17 March 2012, following an agreement two days earlier between all 27 member states of the Council of the European Union and the council's subsequent ruling, SWIFT disconnected all Iranian banks that had been identified as institutions in breach of current EU sanctions from its international network and warned that even more Iranian financial institutions could be disconnected from the network.

In February 2016, most Iranian banks reconnected to the network following the lift of sanctions due to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

[53] Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the foreign ministers of the Baltic states Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia called for Russia to be cut off from SWIFT.

[54] The European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States finally agreed to remove a few Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine; the governments of France, Germany, Italy and Japan individually released statements alongside the EU.

[56][57] The European Union issued the first set of sanctions against Belarus - the first was introduced on 27 February 2022, which banned certain categories of Belarusian items in the EU, including timber, steel, mineral fuels and tobacco.

[63] In the first half of 2016, an anonymous Ukrainian bank and others—even "dozens" that are not being made public—were variously reported to have been "compromised" through the SWIFT network and to have lost money.

[64] In March 2022, Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported about the increased security precautions by the State Police of Thurgau at the SWIFT data centre in Diessenhofen.

Inhabitants of the town described the large complex as a "fortress" or "prison" where frequent security checks of the fenced property are conducted.