SWIFT, Chainlink Test Whether Tokenized Assets Can Work Within Traditional Banking

SWIFT – the secure messaging network used by most of the world's major lenders for international money transfers – has been trialling transactions across multiple blockchains and legacy enterprise systems using tokenized bonds.  

The trials involved prominent finance institutions including BNP Paribas, Intesa Sanpaolo and SocGen's FORGE unit, according to a blog post from Chainlink, a decentralized oracle platform. The work builds on earlier collaboration between Chainlink and the asset management arm of swiss bank UBS, which explored cross-chain settlement over conventional payment rails.

Bridging financial messaging and blockchain

The core ambition is interoperability: enabling blockchain-based assets to 
interact with financial messaging standards such as ISO 20022, rather than 
requiring banks to overhaul their systems entirely. Chainlink's infrastructure translates and routes data between onchain environments and existing networks, acting as a connective layer between two worlds that have, until now, largely operated in parallel.

The latest phase also targets corporate actions processing, a function that remains heavily manual and fragmented across markets. The system uses AI models to 
extract data from financial disclosures, which institutional participants then validate to produce a shared, near real-time record accessible across both blockchain and traditional systems.

In theory, such synchronization could reduce reconciliation requirements and operational breaks between custodians, asset managers and settlement systems, though similar efforts have historically struggled to move beyond controlled environments.

From pilots to integration challenges

Earlier phases of the work addressed foundational concerns around privacy, compliance and messaging compatibility. The latest initiative goes a step further, testing whether tokenized assets can be processed within the existing financial rails, not alongside them. 

If that proves viable, onchain financial instruments such as bonds or funds could move through familiar workflows without relying on parallel infrastructure. That would allow financial firms to reduce operational costs and cut down on the number of intermediaries in post-trade processing. 

The work remains at a testing stage. Broader deployment will ultimately depend on regulatory alignment and whether the industry takes it up.