Unveiled at Swift's annual Sibos jamboree, a proof-of-concept is being carried out to see if Swift messaging solutions can be deployed in the cloud for faster, more efficient and more secure operations for banks, corporates, service bureaus, and other payments ecosystem players.

Currently, more than 11,000 financial institutions carry out transactions by sending payment messages over the Swift network, tapping on-site tech from the organisation.

The PoC creates a bank-like wire transfer experience with the added operational, security and intelligence benefits the Microsoft cloud offers.

Microsoft’s own treasury department is serving as the initial user for the testing. Microsoft Treasury sends a wire instruction through SAP on Azure which gets validated using machine learning algorithms. Once validated for authenticity, these wires are then sent to Swift via Microsoft’s Swift installation on the cloud. Swift validates the wire instructions and sends its off to the appropriate bank. Once the bank completes the wire instruction it sends confirmation over to Microsoft.

The first payment has already been completed and the partners say that they plans to deliver a private preview to joint customers soon.

Ulrich Homann, distinguished architect, Microsoft, says: "In the future ecosystem of open banking and instant payments, we believe this partnership with Swift will enable our combined corporate customers to benefit from the agility, performance and high availability features only made possible by the Azure cloud."

Elsewhere at Sibos, Microsoft revealed that Perpetual Corporate Trust has developed a cloud-based data analytics platform that can act as an early warning signal for mortgage market hotspots.

Perpetual’s Mortgage Market Insights module, developed using Microsoft Azure cloud services and Power BI, allows banks and financial service providers to analyse the performance of their own portfolio and benchmark against the greater than $200 billion Australian mortgage market.