Russian Central Bank Proposes to Discuss a BRICS “Analog” to the SWIFT Bank Clearing System

With a little over a month to go before the BRICS summit opens in early July in Ufa, Russia, the Deputy Governor of Russia’s Central Bank, Olga Skorobogatova, proposed May 29 that the BRICS might take up establishing an “analog” to the SWIFT bank clearing system, according to Russia Today. “Seriously speaking, there is no analog to SWIFT at the moment in the world,” Skorobogatova said, adding that it “may be of interest to all of us within BRICS to consider and talk over the possibility of setting up a system that would apply to the BRICS countries, used as a backup.”

Recall that it was Walter Munchau in the Financial Times who, at the height of the launching of economic sanctions against Russia in 2014, called for bringing Russia to its knees “in a week,” by expelling it from the SWIFT system, since “payment systems are the nuclear bombs of the financial war.” On Dec. 3, 2014, Andrei Kostin, head of Russia’s VTB (Foreign Trade Bank), one of the largest in the country, stated that such steps would constitute a “bright red line” and that, “in my personal opinion, it would mean war, if this type of sanction were introduced.” Russia and China have, in the meantime, been working closely to develop an alternative to the SWIFT system.

Skorobogatova’s comments suggest that this topic is on the agenda in the run-up to the July BRICS summit in Ufa, with Russia as the rotating President and host of that summit. The RT article notes that Russia is the second biggest user of SWIFT in the world, after the U.S., with about 600 Russian banks and companies using it, accounting for some 80% of the payments in the country.