National Bank sees no reason why Belarusian banks should revise relations with SWIFT

<p> MINSK, Dec 4 - PrimePress. The National Bank of Belarus (NBB) sees no objective reasons to review the relationship between Belarusian banks and the SWIFT system, the regulator said in a statement released on December 4. </p> <p>   </p> <p> “The National Bank of the Republic of Belarus does not see any objective reasons to review the existing format of relations between Belarusian banks and the SWIFT system and does not consider the probability of realization of this risk to be high," the NBB said in a commentary. </p> <p>   </p> <p> Earlier the team of ex-presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya launched a public opinion poll via the Internet on the expediency of disconnecting the country’s banks from the interbank system to make SWIFT payments. </p> <p>   </p> <p> While some countries use SWIFT to transmit financial messages for both cross-border and domestic payments, since 1999 Belarus has had an internal system for transmitting financial information of the National Bank, which provides the transmission of financial messages, the main of which are payment documents in Belarusian rubles. A similar system is in place in the Russian Federation - the Bank of Russia Financial Message Transmission System, says the commentary. </p> <p>   </p> <p> Thus, payments by legal entities in Belarus do not depend on SWIFT. “As for the functioning of the system of cashless retail payments, (...) the work of these systems is not connected with SWIFT, and they will operate in a normal mode even if there are some problems in the interaction of Belarusian banks with the SWIFT system. This also applies to bank payment cards issued to accounts whose currency is different from the Belarusian ruble,” the report says. End </p>

2020-12-05

Primepress