Ripple’s SEC saga ends: Is it finally time to challenge SWIFT?
After years of legal disputes, Ripple has settled its disagreements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has provided much-needed clarity regarding its XRP token. This has led many to wonder if Ripple can now finally focus on its original ambitious goal of providing a viable alternative to SWIFT, the global standard for money transfers.
SWIFT, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, has been the undisputed backbone of international money transfers since its inception in 1973. However, for a long time now, critics have argued that the system is outdated. Industry leaders, including Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, contend that blockchain technology offers superior throughput and transparency, making it a more efficient alternative.
Now that the legal problems have been solved for Ripple, the question remains: is it truly able to offer a good alternative to SWIFT?
How does Ripple stack up against SWIFT?
Over half a century ago, SWIFT revolutionized financial transactions by replacing Telex as the primary coding system for global transfers. It’s crucial to understand that SWIFT doesn’t actually move money itself. Instead, it provides a secure messaging platform and standardized codes that enable banks to coordinate money transfers. When you initiate a transfer, your bank sends a request through the SWIFT network to the recipient’s bank, often passing through several intermediary banks. The actual settlement then occurs through established banking relationships and clearing systems.
SWIFT is a huge system, sending and receiving over 53 million messages every day. It works with 40,000 payment routes, connecting 220 countries and working with more than 11,500 institutions. But there are some big disadvantages too. It can take a few days to complete a transaction, and there is often a high fee. Also, the complicated network of banking partners makes it hard to see what is going on and keep track of it. SWIFT itself said in January 2024 that one in ten transactions fails, and one in twenty settles late.
While SWIFT has introduced upgrades, such as the ISO 20022 standard aiming for clearer payment data and enhanced transparency by November 25, 2025, critics argue it’s fundamentally a “legacy” technology built on decades-old XML. In contrast, Ripple offers clear technological advantages, including significantly faster transaction and settlement speeds, along with lower costs.
Back in 2018, just before its protracted legal struggle with the SEC began, Garlinghouse confidently told Bloomberg that Ripple was “taking over SWIFT” as banks and remittance companies began adopting the XRP Ledger. So, with institutional partners reportedly signing on and the price of XRP seeing a significant rise over the past year, what has prevented Ripple from truly challenging SWIFT’s dominance?
Why hasn’t ripple overtaken SWIFT yet?
Cassie Craddock, Ripple’s managing director for the UK and Europe, offers a nuanced perspective. She told Cointelegraph that Ripple doesn’t view blockchain as a replacement for existing financial rails, but rather as a way to “augment and modernize the existing financial infrastructure, creating opportunities for greater efficiency and interoperability.” She emphasizes that scaling to the level of traditional providers requires overcoming two main hurdles: usability and regulation.
Regulation, of course, was Ripple’s most significant impediment. In December 2020, the SEC sued Ripple Labs, alleging that XRP tokens were unregistered securities. This triggered an expensive, multi-year court battle. While a 2023 ruling by Judge Analisa Torres distinguished between programmatic sales of XRP (which did not require securities registration) and institutional sales (which did), the final $125 million civil penalty wasn’t issued until August 2024. Despite initial appeals from both sides, the case was finally dropped in early August 2025, following the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and a shift in the SEC’s crypto priorities.
While the legal battle undoubtedly hampered XRP adoption within the U.S., Ripple continued to secure partnerships globally. Crucially, the resolution of the case provides XRP with unique legal clarity – a rarity in the cryptocurrency space.
However, legal clarity alone may not be enough for Ripple to unseat the world’s largest payments network. Banks themselves must be convinced to fundamentally change their entrenched operating procedures. Pseudonymous software engineer and blockchain proponent Vincent Van Code points out that while SWIFT-powered platforms process billions daily, they are “rigid, costly, and deeply siloed.” A complete core replacement could take “5–7 years and hundreds of millions of dollars—an enormous operational risk.”
Van Code says that banks stick with SWIFT because “every bank already ‘speaks SWIFT,’ making it the safest, cheapest option.” Even projects like SWIFT GPI are just “patches on a nearly 50-year-old foundation.” He says that Ripple has a lot of problems. These include old computer systems, different rules in different countries, and the need to make banks comfortable with XRP. “SWIFT’s widespread use is what makes it so strong, and breaking that network effect will take time.”
Craddock agrees that institutions need “tools that feel familiar.” She believes that new regulations, particularly the GENIUS Act, are a “step toward clear rules that give institutions confidence to adopt blockchain in a compliant way.” She also highlights the role of stablecoins like Ripple USD, which are “simple to understand, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar and behave like cash in digital form,” helping bridge the gap and making traditional financial players more comfortable with crypto and blockchain technology.
The rise of private payments
It is not yet clear if Ripple will be able to change the banking sector’s long-standing practices and if regulators will be able to challenge SWIFT in the future. But the situation for crypto in the U.S. is changing. Lawmakers are creating new roles for digital assets within the traditional financial system. For example, Congress has made it clear that it would prefer more private stablecoins to be created, rather than a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
While Congress hasn’t outright banned a CBDC, it has passed legislation ensuring that only the legislature can create one, effectively excluding the Federal Reserve or commercial entities. Concurrently, the GENIUS Act provides clear regulatory guidelines for stablecoin issuers.
In March, not long after the SEC stopped investigating Ripple, Garlinghouse told Fox News that there is a huge market opportunity in the U.S. and again said that there is a chance to make payment systems more modern and move away from SWIFT. He even said that the “Trump effect is big,” and that more people will use blockchain technologies.
The stage is set for a fascinating evolution in global finance. While SWIFT will continue to be popular for some time, Ripple’s new legal clarity and the changing rules could make the next few years much more competitive in the race for faster, cheaper, and clearer international payments.
