In addition to security and speed, SWIFT offers a standard interface to reach pretty much any bank in the world with a standard message format to provide completely automated processing of payments, straight-through processing (STP) in industry terminology.

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In finance, standards can take years to define as working groups from banks, securities firms and depositories meet repeatedly to hash out what needs to be in a message and ways to make it machine-readable so the communication can be handled by computers with straight-through processing (STP) and not require any expensive, time-consuming and error-inducing human intervention.

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