THIS MESSAGE (MATERIAL) IS CREATED AND (OR) DISTRIBUTED BY A FOREIGN MASS MEDIA PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT AND (OR) A RUSSIAN LEGAL ENTITY PERFORMING THE FUNCTIONS OF A FOREIGN AGENT.
Institute of International Finance experts believe that the Russian version of the SWIFT payment system will only handle domestic payments. As for international operations, here its possibilities, in their opinion, are limited. This is reported by Kommersant with reference to the IIF study.
We are talking about the Financial Message Transmission System of the Central Bank (SPFS), which, according to the study, will not be enough for international traffic, even if it is combined with the Chinese analogue of SWIFT – the SNAPS system. By the way, China has been developing its system since 2015, but at the moment it closes only 0.3% of world traffic. Experts believe that if sanctions are imposed, the trade sector will be the first to suffer, in particular, the export of hydrocarbons to the European Union.
The IIF estimated that about 400 financial institutions are currently registered with the SPFS. In 2020, the share of payments through the Russian analogue of SWIFT increased to 23%. Considering that non-cash payments account for more than 70% of all payments in Russia, if necessary, the SPFS will cover domestic traffic, and there will be no serious collapse of the financial system in Russia.
At the same time, traffic associated with foreign operations raises questions among experts. Not even all banks operating in the Russian Federation have joined the Russian analogue of SWIFT, and the same Mir cards and Russian payment systems as a whole have “low penetration” abroad. The IIF concludes that the expansion of SPFS should be treated with caution and not be expected to be implemented without difficulty.
The prospects for a possible disconnection of Russia from SWIFT began to be discussed back in 2014, after the first wave of US and EU sanctions against Russia. The Russian authorities planned to protect banks from possible problems in the event of a SWIFT shutdown, and since December 2014, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation has provided credit institutions with a new service for transmitting financial messages in SWIFT formats for domestic transactions.
Source: Rosbalt
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