Swift gears up for financial innovation with Elastic Observability

Today, international payments are taken for granted. If you want to transfer money from one country to another it's now possible with just a few clicks on a mobile banking app. But did you ever stop to wonder how dollars become dinars or what makes it so easy to book a hotel on the other side of the world?

The answer almost certainly lies with Swift, the international banking network that for 50 years has enabled businesses and individuals to make cross-border payments based on its FIN messaging standard. Used by 11,000 institutions in 200 countries and territories, Swift handles nearly 45 million messages per day.

But the organization can't rest on its laurels. In recent years, digital transformation in financial services has opened the door to competitors taking advantage of open technology and other innovations including blockchain and NFC wireless data transfer. Remaining relevant in a world where speed and convenience are at a premium is now the main objective for Swift as it gears up to meet these challenges.

"Our priority is to accelerate the launch of new services to deliver innovative client experiences and compete with a new generation of fintech organizations disrupting the marketplace," says Stefan De Moerloose, Head of Product Management, Observability & Analytics at Swift. In recent years, this includes the launch of Swift Go, a service that enables small businesses and their customers to send secure, low-value payments anywhere in the world.

But to deliver better customer experiences at scale, de Moerloose must persuade Swift's development teams to collaborate using common technology platforms. There are 80 such teams across the organization, many of which work in separate IT environments with different technology stacks. "To get their buy-in you need advanced technology that is simple to use and where people can understand the benefits to their own team—as well as the wider Swift organization," says De Moerloose.

De Moerloose proposed a unified observability platform that any team could use to monitor and enhance performance across the DevOps lifecycle. "Speaking the same technical language is a fundamental driver of innovation. A single source of truth makes it easier for different teams to communicate their challenges and objectives."

Swift looked at a number of observability solutions, but Elastic stood out for its flexibility and ease of use. "Using the open-source version of Elastic we built a couple of working solutions and established a business case for a licensed deployment." De Moerloose was also impressed by how easily Elastic ingests and integrates data from many different sources. "It gave us confidence that we could adapt the technology and weren't stuck with rigid out-of-the-box features." Having used Elastic Observability on premises, Swift is now migrating to Elastic Cloud running on AWS. "It means that we spend less time on day-to-day maintenance and more time getting value out of the (Elastic) Stack," says De Moerloose.

One of the biggest benefits for Swift is the ability to manage incidents more rapidly, especially when releasing new products or service updates. In the past this would take days or even months and involved multiple investigations within different departments. Elastic helps Swift go from being reactive to proactive in detecting and resolving issues.

More agile working practices enable Swift to better compete against the latest generation of fintechs. "In our line of business there is always pressure to innovate because of competition, customer expectations, or new regulations. Elastic, with its unified data views and machine learning based analytics, enables us to release to manufacturing faster and more frequently," says De Moerloose.

He also stresses the comprehensive support offered by Elastic Consulting Services. "The Elastic team took time to understand our business culture and the pain points that we wanted to address. They were patient with our approach and didn't try to force us into decisions." On other occasions, Elastic accelerated its own release cycle to incorporate requirements from the Swift team.

Above all, Elastic Observability enables Swift to compete successfully in the increasingly complex financial services industry. Most recently it completed a CBDC (central bank digital currency) pilot with 18 central and commercial banks, processing payments between blockchain networks and traditional fiat currencies. Several other projects are also in the pipeline.