SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is a cooperative society under Belgian law founded in 1973 with the idea of providing standards for data exchange between financial institutions. SWIFT is owned by its members, which include the world’s largest banks.

SWIFT now provides a global interbank messaging network for financial institutions (banks, trading rooms, large corporations). Due to the extreme sensitivity of the messages transiting through this network and the increasingly high level of threats to the organization and its customers, SWIFT implemented the Customer Security Programme in 2017, which imposes a number of mandatory or recommended checkpoints on its customers regarding the security of their IT network.

For SWIFT, the application of security measures across all its users is crucial, since the compromise of a single customer can lead to chain reactions across the network.

These control points must be subject to an annual self-assessment by the customer, coupled with an audit that can be carried out by an external service provider such as Synetis.