BRICS CLEARING, INSLAW’S PROMIS, AND SWIFT
While politics in the USA continues to suck all the oxygen out of the news room with endless discussions of "Orange Man Bad this" and "Madam Kamalarkey that", there are actually other things going on in the world. One of these items is the following (very important) story that many of you sent me. In a nutshell, the long-awaited announcement from the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) has been made that they are determined to build out their own international financial clearing infrastructure independent of (and also parallel to) the SWIFT system. For those who are not familiar with it, SWIFT is the international financial clearing system, headquartered in Brussels (hmmm...) through which the overwhelming majority of all international financial transactions pass. If one gets "sanctioned" from SWIFT, one is cut off from quick and easy financial clearing and settlement of international trade. Needless to say, the system is well under the thumb of the US dollar and its reserve currency status. The meaning of the acronym says it all: the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. SWIFT.
For some years the BRICS nations have been making bi-lateral currency arrangements, agreeing formally to by-pass the dollar and to settle international accounts in their own currencies: Russia and India will settle in rupees and rubles, China and Russia in reminbi and rubles, and so on. And recently,
you'll recall, Japan and India negotiated a mutual logistical support agreement in the case either of them were attacked. While Japan is not formally a member of BRICS, as I argued at the time: you can be relatively and reasonably sure that the settlement of any accounts under such circumstances would be in yen and rupees, and by-passing the dollar.The trouble with all of this is that much of the actual transmission of data, the actual clearing, is still handled bank-to-bank, via the SWIFT system. And there is another problem, and it is one that has been known for a long time: the SWIFT system is more or less a potential "single point of failure". If, for whatever reason, the system should be compromised or be taken down completely, international clearing becomes - instantly - a nightmare. Not impossible, but a nightmare. The BRICS nations have known this too, and have been making noises for some time about creating their own alternative to the SWIFT system.
Which makes the following announcement all the more interesting:
So in other words, it's now official, BRICS is going to build its own version of SWIFT:
Russia confirmed that the BRICS alliance plans to build a new payment system similar to SWIFT. “The financial agenda of BRICS has a main initiative for building a new economic reality that solves both major tasks. Creating our own financial messaging system for the BRICS countries, similar to SWIFT, based on state-owned banks capable of clearing settlements of counterparties from the BRICS countries and the related role of the same bank,” said Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Alexander Babakov.
The ambassador said that creating an alternative to SWIFT is necessary for BRICS to push the de-dollarization agenda ahead. “It is necessary to create a new system of financial institutions. The new system must be technically compatible with the existing financial infrastructures of the participating countries, which includes integration with national payment systems, banks, and other financial institutions. At the same time, the system must ensure a high level of security and data protection to prevent cyber-attacks and unauthorized access to financial information,” he summed it up. (Boldface emphasis in the original article; italicized emphasis added)
These statements prompt a bit of high octane speculation and "reading-between-the-lines" on my part. Notice what the Russian State Duma Deputy Chariman says: the new system must be (1) technically compatible with existing clearing infrastructure of the existing countries and (2) thus be able to be integrated into the those systems, (3) and must have a high degree of security against hacking. Or to put this differently: the code or programming language of the system must be able to read and integrate into the code of all financial institutions with which it deals. It must possess a kind of "multi-lingual" facility, and thus be able to compile and track data and transactions through a variety of different systems, and to integrate with them all. This implies a system with capabilities very similar to, if not identical to, the well-known and infamously stolen Inslaw software, PROMIS. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that the BRICS system is nothing but PROMIS, but I am suggesting that the requirements of the BRICS system are such that its code is bound to have a very similar architecture, and may indeed perhaps be some distant iteration and relative of the original.
These high octane speculations - and that's what they are - lead to a further implication. Why has it taken these nations so long to make this announcement, and how long will such a system take to emplace and be operational? The first thing to notice is that, unlike SWIFT, with its noticeable and sizeable headquarters in Brussels, the BRICS nations have not announced any headquarters for their system. Where is it to be? China? Russia? India? Iran? Kazakstan? We simply don't know, and that, I suspect, is by design. It may even be that there is every intention to make their system a distributed system with multiple "centers" rather than a single headquarters, and that again would fit their strategic objectives in building out such a system very well. A software infrastructure like that implied by the Russian Duma Deputy Chairman would lend itself to such a distributed polycentric network.
But there's another implication, and that stems from all of those bi-lateral currency agreements we've watched the BRICS nations making in recent years. When the whole process began, I warned people that what was really being built, right before their eyes, was a new clearing system, and that along with the bi-lateral currency arrangements, one might also see the abandonment of the idea of a single global reserve currency, and the emergence of regional reserve currencies - and the financial clearing centers to make such a system work. The other side of this high octane speculation is what these bi-lateral currency swap arrangements have really been about; what they are about is precisely to beta-test the arrangements, and to build out the infrastructure of the clearing system that has just been announced, BRIC by BRIC, so to speak. In other words, the system is much further along to becoming fully operational than the announcement might indicate. The announcement is not of the nature "this is what we are going to do" as much as it is of the nature "this is what we are already doing and this is the goal (which we're very close to)."
Time will tell, of course, if my speculations and guesses here are accurate or not, but in that regard, there is one final thing to take note of: it is known that some of the countries now members of the BRICS alliance were sold or given (or in some cases were permitted to steal) versions of the Inslaw PROMIS software program, versions which had been "doctored" with trap doors to allow third parties (the USA) to snoop and spy on other countries' systems in real time. But what if those countries, having discovered this, study the PROMIS architecture, and invent new types of counter-measures, and architectures: that comment by Mr. Babakov cited above in regard to security in such a system, is a crucial point, and in my opinion a giveaway, because it means that the BRICS nations whose systems were compromised by such software - Russia was one of those countries (remember the Farewell spy case!) - may have taken this long to counter with the next generations of "multi-lingual cyber architecture" and languages, and that a clearing system based on them is now feasible.
Guess work? To be sure. Speculation? Absolutely, and note please, not a shred of direct evidence to support it; only a unique way of connecting some dots from the past into contemporary circumstances. Nonetheless, I think it was worthwhile to mention them, and keep the possibilities in mind...
...See you on the flip side...
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