Wise: Bypassing Swift

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Is it typically a fixed fee in dollar or euro amount, or is it a percentage of the transaction?

Here's the interesting part. SWIFT is only charging - whether it's Banco Santander, whether it's the U.S. bank - about 0.03 Euro cents up to 0.05 Euro cents per message. Now again, I'm giving you an average because actually you need a PhD to understand the SWIFT pricing manual. It depends on the message length, it depends on the message type, it depends on the volumes that that correspondent bank is putting over the SWIFT network. So they each have different volume tiers and the more volumes they push through the SWIFT pipe, the cheaper it becomes. But what I'm really getting at is regardless of whether it's 0.03 Euro cents or 0.05, you can see the SWIFT charge to that correspondent bank is peanuts.

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But €6,000 doesn't seem like a lot, or €20,000 for a large institution.

Then you've got the message traffic charges, the messaging fees we discussed earlier. SWIFT has a fixed fee arrangement over a period, usually about three years when I worked there, maybe they've extended that. Over a three-year period or whatever it is now, it has this fixed fee arrangement with many of its members to lock them in and ensure cash flow, which is reinvested into the network, availability, and core infrastructure. But then there are service and product fees. It's not just the messaging traffic charges. There are service and product fees. SWIFT put together a SWIFT Essentials package before I left a couple of years ago, charging for certain products regardless of usage. There are service and product fees, and there might be investments or partnerships involved in SWIFT's funding originally. It's not just the messaging fees; there's a lot more involved in being a member of the SWIFT community.

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