Why Banks Still Prefer SWIFT Over Blockchain Rails Like Ripple

Why Financial Institutions are Reluctant to Move From SWIFT to Blockchain Networks

At Paris Blockchain Week 2026, RippleX Senior Vice President Markus Infanger gave a frank reality check on why major financial institutions still hold back to move large-scale capital onto blockchain networks like the Ripple, despite years of hype, testing, and growing industry momentum.

Speaking during a panel discussion, Infanger highlighted a straightforward but critical barrier holding banks and payment providers back, which is trust at scale. 

While blockchain-based settlement systems have already proven effective in pilots and select corridors, institutions are still cautious about moving serious money, sometimes exceeding $1 billion per flow, onto infrastructure that must perform flawlessly under the intense pressure of global finance.

“We hear sometimes that the old system works well,” Infanger noted, reflecting a common view in traditional finance. 

In practice, even if legacy infrastructure is inefficient, it remains trusted, tightly regulated, and deeply woven into global financial operations, making change slow and difficult.

Why Institutional Trust, Not Technology, Is Still Holding Back Blockchain Finance

While banks have modernized customer-facing tools, the core settlement infrastructure still runs on pre-internet-era systems. Infanger noted that despite sleek digital interfaces, the underlying rails remain slow, costly, and fragmented.

He estimated that $3 trillion to $5 trillion is locked up in the global financial system each year due to credit risk controls, settlement delays, and liquidity buffers, structural inefficiencies that are not just technical friction, but embedded costs of how the system itself operates.

Ripple’s long-term vision becomes clearer in this context. The XRP Ledger is positioned as a next-generation settlement layer for near-instant, low-cost cross-border payments.

Wellm Markus Infanger’s remarks highlight a deeper hurdle about true scalability depending less on transaction speed and cost, and more on whether institutions can trust the system under massive volumes and strict regulatory pressure.

Rather than aiming to fully replace legacy networks like SWIFT, Ripple’s approach is increasingly focused on interoperability. The company appears to be building bridges between traditional financial infrastructure and blockchain-based rails, integrating rather than disrupting outright.

This reflects a broader industry shift. The future of global payments is looking less like a total overhaul and more like a gradual convergence, where blockchain enhances existing systems that already handle trillions in daily flows.

From Paris, the takeaway is straightforward that blockchain rails like Ripple are readying themselves, but institutional trust is still the key constraint.