SWIFT India, a secure financial messaging service for India’s residents, and MonetaGo, a financial technology and information service, announced (on November 20th) the launch of a pilot program (based on a “shared distributed ledger network”) – which will be used to “improve the efficiency and security of their financial products and procedures.”

SWIFT India, MonetaGo To Use DLT To Ensure Security, Privacy

SWIFT India and MonetaGo’s distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based system is reportedly being developed to “meet industry-level governance, security and data privacy requirements” for financial systems.

Commenting on the newly established partnership with MonetaGo, Kiran Shetty, the CEO of SWIFT India, said:

SWIFT India is committed to provide significant value to the Indian financial community through digitisation of trade. MonetaGo's expertise in providing fraud mitigation solutions to avoid double-financing and check authenticity of e-way Bill gave us the confidence to partner with them.

Kiran Shetty

Meanwhile, Jesse Chenard, the CEO of MonetaGo, remarked: 

Given India's focus on a digital infrastructure which is supported by both policy and technological innovation, it makes sense that large institutional players are interested in these products and initiatives. This work is going to positively impact the information available to the banking industry at large.

Jesse Chenard

Losing “Trillions Of Dollars” Due To Ineffective Information System

As explained on the company’s official website, MonetaGo’s suite of financial products aim to “enable critical real-time decision making.” According to MonetaGo, one of the major problems with the world’s financial system is that it is not designed to allow users to easily access important data and it cannot effectively share information between different parties.

“Trillions of dollars a year are lost” because firms cannot access the right financial information at the time when they need it most, MonetaGo explains. In order to address this issue, MonetaGo has developed various products – which reportedly comply with regulatory requirements and have user-friendly interfaces.

Earlier this year, MonetaGo released its proprietary Fraud Mitigation Network in India – which is a shared platform that is not controlled by any one single entity. MonetaGo’s network allows financial firms to “securely and confidentially share information” – thus “reducing fraud around receivables financing.”

Ripple’s Products “Taking Over SWIFT”?

As CryptoGlobe reported in mid-October, many XRP supporters claim that RippleNet (a decentralized network of financial institutions using Ripple’s suite of financial products) is a “strong alternative” to SWIFT.

SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, is a well-established financial messaging system that allows banks worldwide “to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment.”

When questioned recently about whether Ripple’s products could “take over SWIFT one day,” Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple Labs, said: “What we’re doing … is, in fact, taking over SWIFT, in that we’ve now signed well over 100 banks, some of the largest SWIFT-enabled banks in the world are now using Ripple’s technology. [Recently], we saw a remittance company, who is using Ripple’s technology, they reduced the price per transaction to their customers from $20 per transaction to $2 per transaction, and they saw an 800% increase in usage overnight. That’s the type of dynamic that SWIFT isn’t able to support that we’re able to address right now.”