The CBDC cross-border payments project involves 18 central and commercial banks from around the world, including Banque de France, Royal Bank of Canada, Société Générale, HSBC, Deutsche Bundesbank, NatWest, UBS, France's BNP Paribas, Italy's Intesa Sanpaolo, UL's Standard Chartered (STAN) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
"As interest in CBDC grows, so does the risk of fragmentation as an ever-wider range of technologies and standards are experimented with," Louis Sun, global head of domestic and emerging payments at HSBC, said in a statement, adding, that A SWIFT project could lead to "faster, cheaper and more secure cross-border payments".
Naturally, banks are eager to implement SWIFT's CBDC project.
"Central and commercial banks involved in the project saw 'clear potential and value' in SWIFT's CBDC project", reported CNBC last week.
SWIFT said the project's tests so far have shown that CBDCs and traditional currencies can "co-exist" in the same "financial ecosystem".
"Our experiments have shown the critical role SWIFT can play in a financial ecosystem where digital and traditional currencies coexist," said Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer at SWIFT.
"Our solution has been successfully tested in almost 5,000 transactions between two different blockchain networks and traditional fiat currency, and we are happy to have the support of our community in its further development."
"Many participants have made clear their desire for continued interoperability cooperation, and this is particularly pleasing," he added.
Over 100 countries are currently working on some form of CBDC, with some already launching digital currencies while others continue with testing phases.
The fact that SWIFT is working on a system to consolidate even more central bank financial control is not encouraging.
Just look at what happened to Russia - shortly after it invaded Ukraine, it was immediate expelled from the SWIFT payment network .
Indeed, the global SWIFT system was weaponized against Russian banks for deviating from the agenda of a global banking consortium.
What can prevent this from happening to other countries if they cross the line?
A centralized CBDC system supported by SWIFT will only further solidify the New World Order paradigm in the countries that adopt it.