 
 
Adoption in global finance is driven by both scale and common standards. The member-owned cooperative connects over 11,000+ institutions across 200 countries and territories, and delivers 90% of cross-border payments to beneficiary banks.
SWIFT is moving beyond experiments. Live bank trials for digital-asset and digital-currency transactions, using banks’ existing SWIFT connections across North America, Europe, and Asia.
At the same time, Ripple has deepened its footprint in regulated finance, but without any public tie-up to SWIFT. Through 2025, Ripple’s press disclosures focus on a roughly $200 million acquisition of Rail.
These are the rollout of its USD-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, with partners in Africa and Japan, as well as custody and tokenization initiatives—not a SWIFT integration.
A resurfaced industry remark has revived a long-running question: are Ripple and SWIFT destined to compete—or converge? Robert Pehrson, Head of Products at SEB, said at a prior industry forum that Ripple’s future lay in being integrated into “some other network like SWIFT,” rather than replacing it outright.
 
The backdrop matters. SEB has first-hand experience with Ripple; some years back, the Swedish bank signed on to use Ripple’s technology to speed cross-border transfers between Sweden and the U.S. That gave SEB line-of-sight into how enterprise blockchains might plug into incumbent rails.
SWIFT is opening doors to tokenized finance
SWIFT has been testing how to move instructions for tokenized assets across multiple blockchains while keeping banks inside familiar controls and standards.
In 2023, SWIFT said it had successfully run experiments—working with major institutions and Chainlink—to connect traditional systems to public and private blockchains for tokenized asset settlement.
The initiative aims to demonstrate that banks can transact seamlessly between traditional fiat rails and emerging digital forms of value.
A practical on-ramp for any SWIFT–Ripple alignment is ISO 20022. SWIFT’s cross-border payments and reporting migration began in March 2023 and continues through November 2025, when the coexistence period with legacy MT messages ends.
How integration could work (if it comes)
If banks request it, a plausible path would be message-level interoperability, rather than wholesale replacement of either network.
SWIFT could carry standardized payment instructions (ISO 20022) that reference on-chain settlement on networks like the XRP Ledger or via Ripple’s enterprise stack; banks would keep using their SWIFT interfaces while optionally settling some legs in tokenized instruments or stablecoins where regulation and liquidity allow.
That mirrors how SWIFT has approached tokenized-asset pilots—using the network you already have, add interoperability modules.
Source: https://zycrypto.com/from-rival-to-partner-ripples-xrp-could-integrate-with-swifts-11000-banks/
