ABSTRACT
Over the years, SWIFT has crossed many social, political, and geographical boundaries and been surrounded by debates regarding the development of its standards and access to its network. Despite these challenges SWIFT remains a longstanding and important example of a cooperative network of competitors leveraging a member-owned infrastructure and the interoperability benefi ts that it generates. In this chapter, we review events that highlight the way in which global institutions such as SWIFT have to manage multiple constituencies and enter into negotiations with a wide range of organizations representing diverse interests, placing current debates in historical perspective. We begin by examining make-or-break tariff negotiations with state-owned Post, Telegraph, and Telecom authorities (PTT) which we use as the basis for a discussion about cooperative status and the challenges of organizational boundary management. In the second section, we describe SWIFT’s involvement in the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) and discuss the issues of data governance that this raised. Next, we review the recent regulatory-mandated exclusion of Iranian institutions and briefl y examine the pressures on SWIFT’s standing as a global system. Finally, we put these events and their implications in the context of a broader discourse on globalization.
