SWIFT is the backbone of international banking — but most people have no idea how it works. Here's a plain-language guide to what happens when you send money across borders.
SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It is a cooperative network that enables financial institutions to securely exchange standardised messages about financial transactions. SWIFT does not move money itself — it moves the instructions that tell banks where to send money and how much.
When you initiate an international transfer from Bank of Asia Online, several things happen in sequence. First, our system validates your beneficiary details — IBAN or account number, BIC/SWIFT code, and the receiving bank's address. Then we send a SWIFT MT103 message (or the newer ISO 20022 equivalent) through the SWIFT network to the correspondent banking chain.
Most international transfers do not go directly from your bank to the beneficiary's bank. Instead, they pass through one or more correspondent banks — large institutions that maintain accounts on behalf of smaller banks in different countries. This is why you sometimes see multiple fees or why a transfer to a small bank in a less-common currency can take longer than one to a major institution.
The typical timeline for a SWIFT transfer is 1–3 business days, though transfers within the same currency zone (e.g., GBP to a UK bank) often settle the same day via faster local rails. Delays occur when correspondent banks require additional compliance screening, when beneficiary bank details are incorrect, or when transfers fall outside local banking hours.
Bank of Asia Online publishes our full fee schedule transparently: $8.00 flat fee plus 0.5% of the transfer value. This covers our SWIFT messaging costs and our correspondent banking fees. We do not apply a hidden margin to the exchange rate — the rate you see in our converter is the rate applied to your transfer, with the fee listed separately.
One common source of confusion is that the beneficiary may receive slightly less than the converted amount you sent. This happens when the receiving bank or an intermediary correspondent charges their own fee before the funds arrive. While we absorb our own costs in the stated fee, we cannot control fees charged by third-party banks in the correspondent chain. Transfers to major banks in USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, and SGD typically arrive with no additional deductions.