THE DECISION BY Western nations to sanction some Russian banks by excluding them from the SWIFT messaging system that underpins international bank payments will spur Beijing to accelerate the adoption of its alternative.
At its core, SWIFT is a secure messaging system, as its full name — Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — implies. Thus there is no reason that its functionality cannot be replicated.
China and Russia have had rivals since 2015, the Cross-Border International Payments System (CIPS) and the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), respectively.
However, SWIFT’s power comes from its near-universal usage by more than 11,000 financial institutions across 212 countries, conducting 42 million transactions a day on average worth some $5 trillion.
By comparison, CIPS is in its infancy. It embraces only 80 foreign banks, including some Russian ones, but most of its 1,200 participant banks are Chinese or their overseas subsidiaries.
CIPS is mainly used domestically and for transactions between Hong Kong and the mainland. There is some regional use (8% of total CIPS transactions in 2020), but take-up is marginal in Africa, Latin America, and Europe.
In 2020, CIPS handled 2.2 million payment transactions across the year, with a total value of $7 trillion. However, that represented an increase over the previous year of about one-fifth for transaction volumes and approaching one-third for values.
CIPS has been getting more policy attention since the introduction of Hong Kong’s National Security law, which heightened concern over financial sanctions from the West. This has slightly shifted the focus from CIPS’s original goal of supporting yuan internationalisation to creating a SWIFT alternative should one become necessary.
SPFS, too, is used mainly domestically, accounting for around one-fifth of domestic financial payments. However, only a handful of international banks have signed up.
Neither system is anywhere near challenging SWIFT, even though Iran, which was kicked off SWIFT, in 2019, has declared it may soon be able to circumvent Western sanctions by using a combination of the Chinese and Russian alternatives to get around its own sanctions problems.
Its optimism is based on talks between Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in December. According to the Russian side, the two leaders agreed to develop a joint financial messaging and clearing system that would recruit numerous international banks. That will not happen overnight.
It is not a question of building out the systems. It is getting financial institutions to use them. SWIFT has more bells and whistles than CIPS and SPFS and can be used for capital transactions. Yet they are both still clearing and settlement systems, not rocket science. They just have to be reliable, efficient and cheap.
Usage has an element of chicken and egg. As long as so few global transactions are conducted in yuan, a Chinese clearing system will not attract many foreign adopters. Yet, if the system is little used, there is scant incentive for trade to be denominated in yuan.
Further, the strong network effects SWIFT enjoys also mean high user stickiness and substantial switching costs. This Bystander has read estimates that of the banks on CIPS and SPFS, only 10% of their transactions go through one or other of the services.
SWIFT is not a dollar-based system per se or even a US entity. It can clear in 26 currencies, operates from Belgium under Belgian law, and is overseen by Belgium’s central bank.
Yet SWIFT’s geopolitical power accrues to the United States as it is one of the critical props of the dollar’s centrality as a global currency. The dollar and euro have swapped primacy back and forth as the most used currency for international payments.
Yet, at around 40% each, both overshadow the yuan’s share of barely 3%, making it difficult for China to circumnavigate the Western financial system. The dollar’s use is the root of its global influence.
China would like the yuan to break the dollar’s hegemony over international trade. It has been actively pursuing bilateral currency swaps, such as its rolling three-year arrangement with Russia so that more trade can be settled in yuan. However, even its Belt and Road contracts tend to be dollar-denominated, and the bulk of China’s international trade is conducted in currencies other than the yuan.
Once that changes, which will likely require more relaxation of capital controls, CIPS is in place to facilitate that trade. But the cart can’t pull the horse.
China Bystander 
While the US is concerning itself with useless idiot issues like George Floyd, false equity, border floods of criminals and letting cities be burned by redundant welfare people and drug addicts, the world is growing around them.