Swift

Ripple has finally finished its legal battle against the US Securities and Exchange Commission, bringing legal clarity to its underlying coin, XRP (XRP). Now observers are asking whether XRP can finally focus on providing a viable alternative to SWIFT.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has been the backbone of international money transfers since its founding in 1973. However, for several years, critics have said that the system is outdated.

Many in the blockchain industry, including Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, argue that blockchain technology provides higher throughput and better transparency, making it a superior alternative to SWIFT.

Now that Ripple’s legal battles have calmed down, can it provide a reasonable alternative to SWIFT?

How does Ripple stack up to SWIFT?

Over 50 years ago, SWIFT replaced Telex as the coding system underpinning worldwide financial transactions. The system does not send money itself but rather provides standardized codes and a secure messaging platform through which banks can coordinate money transfers.

A customer will make a money transfer request. Their bank will then send the request to the recipient bank, and that request may go through several other banks in the network. Actual settlement happens through established banking relationships and clearing systems.

SWIFT processes over 53 million messages daily across 40,000 payment routes, 220 countries and over 11,500 institutions.

But there are some major complaints with SWIFT. Transactions can take several days and are rife with fees. Furthermore, the complex network of bank partners means it is more difficult to ensure visibility.

There are also delays and failures. SWIFT said in January 2024 that one in 10 transactions fails, while one in 20 settles late. 

The network has undergone a number of upgrades since its inception, including .

ISO 20022, which aims to provide clearer payment data and more transparency by Nov. 25, 2025. Still, critics claim it is ultimately outdated “legacy” tech running on decades-old XML technology.

SWIFT may have the advantage of ubiquity and clear institutional adoption, but Ripple offers a clear advantage in technological terms, with faster transaction and settlement speeds, as well as lower costs.

In 2018, just a couple of years before Ripple’s years-long legal battle with the SEC would begin, Garlinghouse told Bloomberg, “What we’re doing and executing on a day-by-day basis is, in fact, taking over SWIFT” as banks and remittance companies signed on to use XRP Ledger.

So, with institutional partners signing on and the XRP price on a tear over the last year, what’s stopping Ripple’s ledger from challenging SWIFT?

XRP’s price increased 400% over the year. Source: CoinMarketCap

So, why hasn’t Ripple overtaken SWIFT?

Cassie Craddock, managing director for UK and Europe at Ripple, told Cointelegraph, “We don’t see blockchain as an opportunity to replace legacy rails, rather a way of augmenting and modernizing the existing financial infrastructure, creating opportunities for greater efficiency and interoperability.”

Still, “scaling to the level of traditional providers requires tackling two key hurdles: usability and regulation.”

Regarding regulation, Ripple was, until recently, part of a particularly high-profile court case.

In December 2020, the SEC under Chairman Jay Clayton sued Ripple Labs for failing to register its XRP tokens as securities under US law. The commission alleged that the company and its executives raised capital through unregistered securities sales. What followed was an expensive, years-long court battle.

In 2023, Judge Analisa Torres ruled that the programmatic sales of XRP did not require securities registration, but that its XPR sales to institutional investors did. The court didn’t issue its final $125-million civil penalty to Ripple until August 2024.

Related: Ripple vs. SEC: How the lawsuit strengthened XRP’s narrative

By October, Ripple and the SEC had filed respective appeals, but following the election of US President Donald Trump and the realignment of the SEC’s priorities for crypto, both parties finally agreed to drop their case in early August 2025.

The case may have hampered XRP adoption in the US, but during the case, it signed partnerships with institutions in numerous other jurisdictions around the globe. Furthermore, the case gives XRP specifically unique legal clarity — something few cryptocurrencies can boast.

However, legal clarity may not be enough for Ripple to overtake the world’s largest payments network, as banks themselves must be convinced to change how they operate.

Pseudonymous software engineer and blockchain proponent Vincent Van Code said that platforms using SWIFT “process billions daily, but they are rigid, costly, and deeply siloed. A core replacement can take 5–7 years and hundreds of millions of dollars—an enormous operational risk.”

They said that banks don’t change their systems because “every bank already ‘speaks SWIFT,’ making it the safest, cheapest option. Even initiatives like SWIFT GPI are just patches on a nearly 50-year-old foundation.”

Van Code concluded that Ripple has to contend with fragile legacy cores and “uneven” global regulation and assuage risk-averse banks — all while countering perceptions about its underlying token’s liquidity.

“SWIFT’s ubiquity is its moat, and breaking that network effect will take time.”

Craddock said that “institutions need tools that feel familiar,” and that new regulations, particularly the GENIUS Act, are a “step toward clear rules that give institutions confidence to adopt blockchain in a compliant way.”

“Stablecoins like Ripple USD are helping bridge this gap — they’re simple to understand, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar and behave like cash in digital form. That familiarity is why we’re seeing traditional financial players increasingly comfortable using crypto and blockchain tech today.”

Private payments gain ground

It’s unclear whether Ripple can take on SWIFT in the future, overcoming the entrenched business practices of the banking sector and less-than-enthusiastic regulators.

However, crypto is ascendant in the US, where lawmakers are making carveouts for digital assets to fulfill critical roles in the traditional finance system. Congress has clearly expressed its preference for the proliferation of private stablecoins over a digital dollar or central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Congress has not outright banned a CBDC, but it has created a law whereby only the legislature can create one, excluding the Federal Reserve or commercial entities. At the same time, it passed the GENIUS Act, which gives clear rules for stablecoin issuers.

In March, after the SEC dropped its investigation into Ripple, Garlinghouse told Fox News that “the market opportunity is massive” in the US and said that there’s an opportunity to modernize the payment systems from SWIFT.

“The Trump effect is profound […] you’re gonna see that in the adoption of these [blockchain] technologies.”

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