Correspondent banking, SWIFT, and the geographies of financial infrastructure: Technological and organizational change in cross-border payments

This thesis examines the impacts of technical and organizational change on the geographies of finance via infrastructure for cross-border payments, employing a qualitative methodology of semi-structured expert interviews. The study finds that SWIFT’s messaging system together with the correspondent banking system, a decentralized global network of bilateral contracts between banks, remain a geographically and historically foundational sociotechnical infrastructure connecting IFCs. To stave off fintech challengers and preserve banks’ incumbency, SWIFT’s system is platformizing with the aim of changing banks’ business models from fee-extraction towards economic use of transaction data. Collaborative action in bringing about change across a global network is a key finance industry agency for maintaining its collective dominance. SWIFT’s cooperative organizational form is a significant locus for this agency, engendering trust as a relational aspect of power to resolve tensions among actors and processes across scales. Specialized infrastructure is instrumental in how the geographies of finance are (re)shaped.