EU Regulators Fast To Condemn SWIFT

This article was originally published in Bristows' monthly IT e-newsletter 'The Cookie Jar'.

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, that operates a worldwide financial messaging service facilitating money transfers has found itself tripped-up by EU data laws. On 22^nd November, the influential Article 29 Working Party (i.e. the EU Data Protection Regulators) issued a damning opinion on the compliance of the SWIFTNet FIN Service with the EU Data Protection Directive. The Opinion is significant, both commercially – the SWIFT service processes over 2 billion payment-related messages a year – and legally. It assesses SWIFT’s compliance against the various requirements of the Directive and finds its service lacking on almost all of them.