>First, we need to acknowledge that SWIFT is not cheap. If Barclays had to send a SWIFT message to HSBC every time you wanted to pay £10 to Charlie, you would soon notice some hefty charges on your statement.
Why is this so? Sure in decades past it might have been expensive to send so many messages, but today it should be easily accomplished with moderate hardware. Wikipedia says SWIFT did about 15M tx/day in Sept 2010. That seems pretty miniscule as far as hardware load goes.
All the per-transaction prices are below 15 euro cents. Banks charge you many £/€ for a SWIFT transfer because they can, not because of what it costs; usually to subsidise the existence of branches.
Edit: I see another commenter has hit the same link :)
Swift have one of the biggest moats in the world. They are in all banks already, other businesses are not, they are already trusted and they sell both the service and the hw to access their service. So they can charge a lot for their services. What the banks want is a 100% reliable and traceable communications system that everyone trust. Good luck breaking into that market. :)
I imagine they dont mind paying a lot because they dont actually need to send that much information.
That looks to be a bit old version of their prices.
I've met some of the nice Belgian guys that run their support - not a job I'd really like. If there's a business where you need to be conservative, and defects are really not ok in any way, it's theirs.
Why is this so? Sure in decades past it might have been expensive to send so many messages, but today it should be easily accomplished with moderate hardware. Wikipedia says SWIFT did about 15M tx/day in Sept 2010. That seems pretty miniscule as far as hardware load goes.