Microsoft Corp. has teamed up with Swift SCRL to bring the organization’s financial communications network to Azure.

The Swift system is a core pillar of global commerce that’s used by over 11,000 financial institutions, as well as major corporations, to exchange data about transactions between their accounts. It helps process most of the world’s international money and securities transfers.

Microsoft’s collaboration with Swift, which was announced Sunday night, has produced a proof-of-concept implementation of the system that runs on Azure. The deployment is currently being used by technology giant’s finance group to handle certain internal transactions. Guru Kirthigavasan, the principal program manager assigned to the project, said that the division makes more than $400 billion worth of payments via Swift every year to support Microsoft’s operations.

The technology giant intends to turn the proof-of-concept into a cloud service for financial institutions. According to Microsoft, the goal is to provide a simpler alternative to the on-premise infrastructure that banks currently use to access Swift.

With that said, the planned offering’s value proposition won’t be limited simply to reducing administrative overhead. Microsoft is exploring the possibility of building out integrations with other Azure services to streamline transaction management.

“Beyond the immediate operational and security benefits realized by moving the service to the cloud, there is significant potential to add additional business logic, advanced analytics, and AI capabilities to further improve how banks and corporations conduct transfers and identify trends and insights,” Microsoft’s Kirthigavasan wrote.

The company didn’t go into much detail about what exactly customers can expect, but its finance division’s internal pilot offers a general idea. Microsoft has implemented AI algorithms that check the authenticity of payments before they’re sent to Swift. Azure offers a large collection of machine learning services that should theoretically enable banks to implement similar mechanisms for their own future deployments.

Microsoft’s planned Swift service could potentially open a significant new revenue stream for the company in the finance industry, where practically every firm relies on the network. If the offering gains enough traction, the technology giant would effectively be helping to shift a core component of the global banking system to the cloud. That will become especially likely if rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. decide to join the fray with their own hosted Swift implementations.

Microsoft expects to release a public preview of the offering in the “near future.” It will join Azure’s extensive lineup of industry-specific services, which the company previously bolstered with the addition of a genomic analysis platform for the life sciences sector.  

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