SWIFT to Host Infrastructure and Native Payments on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft has announced a proof of concept cloud partnership with SWIFT, world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services, to host its infrastructure and native payments on Microsoft Azure. Together, the two companies are working to facilitate the future deployment of SWIFT messaging solutions in the cloud, enabling faster, more efficient and secure operations for banks.

Microsoft’s own treasury department, which manages over $150 billion in assets and supports $400 billion per year in SWIFT based payments, is serving as the initial user for the proof of concept. The announcement was made at Sibos 2018, world’s premier financial services event and annual conference.

“The joint deep engineering engagement between SWIFT and Microsoft has delivered a more secure and compliant cloud services that will benefit the industry as a whole,” said Ulrich Homann, Distinguished Architect at Microsoft. “In the future ecosystem of open banking and instant payments, we believe this partnership with SWIFT will enable our combined corporate customers to benefit from the agility, performance and high availability features only made possible by the Azure cloud.”

In addition, Microsoft also announced new innovations across the Microsoft Cloud portfolio. These include:

• Customer Lockbox for Microsoft Azure: Customer Lockbox for Microsoft Azure helps customers control and audit a Microsoft support engineer’s access to compute workloads on Azure that may contain customer data while resolving a support issue.
• Azure Confidential Computing: Azure Confidential Computing offers the possibility to keep data safe by isolating it while it is processed – a common method of data theft. Azure is the first cloud service to provide a secure platform for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of data in use using trusted execution environments (TEEs), and we’re rolling out a new family of virtual machines to ensure confidential computing is available to all Azure customers.
• Microsoft Compliance Manager: Compliance Manager is a workflow-based risk assessment tool designed to help manage regulatory compliance within the shared responsibility model of the cloud.